Driving Smarter Decisions in Freight Pricing with AI

The Starting Point

In Slovakia’s highly competitive transportation industry, margins are razor-thin and every pricing decision matters. Logistics companies live in a constant balancing act: bid too high and you lose the contract, bid too low and you cut into already narrow profits.

One of our clients, a mid-sized freight carrier, felt this tension daily. Their team was spending hours trying to determine the “right” price for each shipment, manually juggling dozens of variables — fuel price fluctuations, highway tolls, seasonal demand, labor costs, maintenance, and even regional competition. Still, they could never be sure whether they were overestimating or underbidding.

In the high-stakes world of freight bidding, uncertainty was costly.

The Challenge

On bidding platforms, speed and accuracy define success. Yet the company’s existing process made every quotation a gamble:

• Hidden costs like highway fees, driver rest schedules, and holiday season surcharges had to be manually factored in.
• Fuel prices shifted week to week, making static pricing models obsolete overnight.
• Competitor dynamics were opaque — was a lost bid due to overpricing, or because competitors had optimized better?
• Scalability was impossible: the more bids the company received, the longer the team fell behind.

What the client needed wasn’t just faster calculations. They needed a way to transform uncertainty into confidence — and data into competitive advantage.

The Turning Point

That’s where Syntheticaire stepped in.

Together with the client, we designed and trained a dynamic AI pricing model capable of simulating real-world complexity. The system ingests multiple parameters — distance, type of cargo, potential connecting freights, tolls, seasonality, and even external market signals like fuel prices — to generate an optimized price recommendation within seconds.

The model was built to be flexible:

• Manual Mode: Supporting dispatchers with instant price suggestions while they prepared offers.
• Automated Mode: Seamlessly connected to bidding platforms through secure APIs, enabling real-time, competitive pricing.

And because data security is paramount in logistics, we ensured that the entire algorithm operates exclusively on the company’s internal servers. No third party — not even us — can access the pricing logic. This gave the client peace of mind that their hard-earned data and competitive insights would never leave their control.

The Outcome

The results were immediate and tangible:

• Faster bids: Offers that once took hours to calculate were ready in minutes.
• Higher accuracy: The model accounted for hidden variables that were often overlooked manually, reducing financial leakage.
• Increased win rate: By finding the sweet spot between under- and overpricing, the client began winning more contracts without sacrificing profitability.
• Employee relief: Dispatchers shifted from tedious manual calculations to higher-value decision-making, supported by data-backed confidence.

The client’s leadership summed it up best:

“For the first time, we feel like we’re bidding with clarity, not crossing our fingers.”

Looking Ahead

What started as a pricing engine has now sparked bigger ambitions. The client is exploring predictive analytics for fleet utilization, route optimization, and long-term fuel contract planning — all powered by the same AI infrastructure we helped build.

In a sector where competition is relentless and volatility is the norm, this Slovak freight carrier is now leading with intelligence, not guesswork.

Let’s Explore What’s Possible

If your business lives in the uncertainty of pricing — whether in logistics or any other industry — imagine what clarity could do for your bottom line.

At Syntheticaire, we’d love to explore how AI can turn your pricing challenges into your competitive edge.