Touchless loads, a milestone in Uber Freight’s vision to simplify logistics

Today we’re excited to announce a new milestone in our vision to simplify logistics: moving tens of thousands of touchless loads for key customers. Uber Freight is leading the industry to achieve completely automated end-to-end freight transactions, moving beyond automated pricing and matching to enable freight transactions that can take place automatically and without intervention. 

Our real-time pricing, booking, and matching capabilities have long enabled us to remove countless hours of manual work for shippers—technology that has proved critical to fast, reliable service in today’s volatile market. Other touchpoints in the process are more difficult to fully automate, such as appointment scheduling and award management, and have remained unsolved in the industry for a long time. 

To achieve end-to-end automation, Uber Freight focused on the most labor-intensive touchpoints throughout the freight life cycle and built technology to solve each. From tender to proof of delivery, our loads can now move without any manual intervention.

Our direct API integrations mean that when a shipper tenders a load, the Uber Freight platform automatically requests and verifies appointments, generates a price based on real-time capacity and market data (which optimizes loads for quick coverage), and makes the load available on the carrier marketplace. A carrier books the load and dispatches their driver, all through the app or web portal, and tracking events are automatically sent to the shippers’ TMS, from driver arrival to departure. Drivers upload their proof of delivery directly through the carrier app for invoicing. Tasks that once required hours of back-and-forth phone calls and emails now happen automatically, with precision, in seconds. 

We’ve seen a trend toward more automation within shipper operations. Shippers are looking for partners who can also help them become touchless. Uber Freight’s pricing API lets shippers eliminate significant labor and friction in their operations. We launched with BluJay in April 2020 after our launch with SAP last year. We continue to lead the industry in integrations and functionality.

A key to resilient supply chains in a volatile market 

We achieved our first touchless load last fall and are now moving tens of thousands with key customers. Over a quarter of our touchless loads moved with less than 48 hours of lead time, and 10 percent with less than 24 hours of lead time. We see a clear path to even greater scale, where touchless loads enable carriers to see business opportunities faster, transform shipper operations, and ultimately cut time, noise, and friction from the marketplace as a whole. 

During times of market volatility, touchless loads enable shippers to maximize efficiency and source instant capacity; this improves operations and service for shippers, bolstering supply chain resilience in a time when it’s most crucial. We’re committed to accelerating our efforts to help shippers build sustainable supply chains that are resilient to global disruptions and stripped of waste.