Altkom AI Assist. A generative AI-driven transport app for customer service and data analytics

Generative artificial intelligence – what is it and how does it work?

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence concerned with creating new content and images based on existing training data. Generative AI works much like a human brain: it can generate new ideas, texts or images based on accumulated knowledge and experience.

Generative AI is based on advanced machine learning models trained on large data sets. Altkom AI Assist uses an LLM (Large Language Model), or an advanced language model trained on a huge textual data set to understand and process natural language (NLP).

As a result, the built-in language model understands the context of the conversation and can ask and answer questions in a way that perfectly simulates a human being.

How does Altkom AI Assist work and what can it do?

When creating our virtual assistant, our eyes were focused on a problem faced by practically everyone in the transport industry. Overflowing e-mail inboxes, full of valuable offers and queries, but also of spam and orders that the company does not wish to take. A huge database of messages and information that nobody can tap because there is simply not enough time.

Incoming mail

Initially, we designed Altkom AI Assist to process and classify incoming messages. Our AI model sifted through incoming mail to fish out relevant delivery information and then forwarded it to shipping agents for further processing. Potentially attractive offers were passed on to agents, while others were used to analyse customer mood and expectations.

Today, our application has gone far beyond its modest beginnings. It still does all the above things, but has also been expanded to enable full outgoing mail automation.

Outgoing mail

Altkom AI Assist can assume full control of outgoing mail, e.g. within the framework of marketing campaigns. All you need to do is update your CRM with a customer database and our model will automatically create and send out cold e-mails to selected recipients.

Importantly, customers rarely include all the necessary transport details in a single message. This means shipping agents need to invest a lot of time in sending repeated e-mails until they finally tease out precise order information. Fortunately, our virtual assistant was trained to quickly notice whenever a message lacks important details, such as a delivery deadline. 

Order automation 

Altkom AI Assist will continue messaging the customer until it gets all the necessary order parameters or the correspondence ends for another reason. Whenever the AI model is being trained to meet the needs of a specific company, it is also instructed how long a conversation should typically take so that it is not dragged out indefinitely. 

As we have already mentioned, our AI model is flexible and adapts to the subject at hand; all its messages sound natural, giving the impression of having been sent by an actual person. 

What happens to an order once it’s ready? 

When the AI model decides it has collected all the information it needs, it forwards the order to an agent. How exactly this happens will depend on the needs and preferences of any given company. The AI can send an e-mail to the shipping agent or the order can be directly imported into a CRM or TMS system. 

If the TMS system is connected to a freight exchange (be it internal or external), the model can also immediately publish the order. 

Will Altkom AI Assist adapt to your transport portfolio? 

Simply put: yes.   

We understand that the TSL industry is not homogeneous, order parameters can change depending on the type of cargo and business correspondence is studded with industry-specific jargon that is often incomprehensible to anyone from the outside. 

Our AI model is teachable: before it is deployed in your systems, it will receive extra training based on your company data (e.g. earlier correspondence). Even if it was previously employed in dairy transport, it will quickly learn how to work with pallets. 

International transport 

Generative AI has one more important advantage: it can quickly master a foreign language. People rarely speak more than two or three languages, so shipping agents often need to fall back on automated translation tools. Our AI model can relieve them of that task, using foreign languages more effectively than Google Translate ever could. 

How is the app implemented?  

Altkom AI Assist technology relies on cloud services, so it does not overload in-house infrastructure (although an on-premise solution can also be implemented). The app can be integrated with company solutions, such as CRM or TMS systems, but also data analytics software. 

Data analytics is an important part of the tool: all historical conversations (including those that ended in an order and those that did not) can be used for this purpose, e.g. to enable customer scoring, assess customer satisfaction or sales effectiveness, or monitor market trends and preferences. 

Knowing such historical data also allows system use costs to be better estimated. 

AI-based transport. Is this the future of the industry?

Not so long ago people wondered whether ChatGTP would be a game changer in the transport industry. Today, we already know that the change is coming slower than expected, even though AI can find a wide range of applications in the TSL industry and more and more companies are catching on to its huge potential.

Altkom AI Assist represents a modern generative AI-driven approach to customer service in the transport industry. By using advanced LLMs, the application automates e-mail correspondence processes, from order data collection to quote generation. Thanks to this technology, transport companies can effectively manage their business correspondence, optimise their sales processes and enhance their customer service.

And e-mail is just one possible communication channel. There are also text and voice messengers.