Doft Taps Machine Learning to Give Shippers Rates 4 Weeks in Advance

Doft, the cargo-hauling trucking platform, has unveiled a feature that gives shippers - the companies and distributors who dispatch cargo en masse - access to real-time market rates for specific routes up to four weeks in advance.

The feature, called Rate Forecast, is part of Doft for shippers, which offers companies technological capabilities similar to those carriers have enjoyed from the start.

In lane

For shippers, part of the appeal of Doft lies in its instant marketplace pricing, generated in real time based on conditions like driver availability and other freight-specific variables such as distance, location, time of year, and cargo type.

However, if a shipper wants to schedule a load for the same route each week, they won't necessarily know how much it will cost, since fluctuating market conditions can move pricing. With Rate Forecast, Doft harnesses machine learning to assess these dynamic factors and generate rates in real time up to one month in advance.

In an industry like logistics, where market trends can be opaque and conventional practices are often the go-to solution, Rate Forecast sets a new standard for market visibility.

It works a little like a flight-booking engine: choose your pickup and drop-off locations, and the price for each of the next 30 days is displayed in a calendar format.

Until now, the best way to get an accurate quote on a shipment was to call or email a carrier and negotiate a price for each load. Most shippers don't have time to do that for every individual shipment, so they often rely on their knowledge of past rates to judge whether they're getting a good price. Rate Forecast is like calling thousands of trucks for every day and every lane simultaneously and seeing the best rate for each one.