A single hard-to-cover truck can burn five to six hours of a dispatcher's day. Hey Bubba AI says its platform can compress that to a ranked shortlist by negotiating with five to ten brokers simultaneously — by phone, email and API.

Gabriel Ribeiro, Head of Partnerships and Marketing at Hey Bubba AI, told FreightWaves the platform runs those parallel negotiations and hands the carrier the best available option at that moment, rather than forcing a dispatcher to work each opportunity one at a time.

"When we're talking to owner-operators — any fleet — when they have a tough truck to cover, it could take them five, six hours to negotiate it and book the truck depending on if it's a same-day load or next day," Ribeiro said. "What we're trying to do is create five or ten different offers for them to look at to see what's really the best option for them at that moment."

He added: "We do it all simultaneously at the same time with calling, emailing, APIs, and just giving the driver or the carrier the best option that is there in that moment for them."

Beyond booking

The negotiation engine is only part of the stack. Ribeiro said the platform scans rate confirmations and bills of lading for errors — a task where AI outperforms humans who can miss a single digit — and pushes real-time location updates to brokers through automated tracking calls triggered by carrier-defined rules.

The system connects to ELDs for hours-of-service data, VoIP services, load boards and telematics feeds. Ribeiro framed the approach as connecting existing tools rather than replacing them — a positioning that matters for small fleets with sunk costs in telematics and TMS infrastructure.

ActionWeave and the modular agent menu

The company recently launched ActionWeave AI, an agent-orchestration backend that lets carriers pick individual agents — accounts receivable, compliance, booking — from a menu and enable them across specific parts of their operation. Ribeiro said larger organizations are already piloting the platform and that Hey Bubba built much of the current toolset over the past six to twelve months based directly on customer feedback.

Hands-free for drivers

On the driver side, carriers are testing a hands-free application that supports roughly 30 to 40 languages and lets drivers interact with the system by voice — similar to Siri — without touching a phone or tablet.

Ribeiro said safety directors are driving adoption, pointing to distracted driving as a significant accident and compliance risk. The voice interface also tackles a retention problem: a driver who needs information at 11 p.m. can get it from the AI instead of waiting for a dispatcher to answer.

Start small — and pay for the account

Despite the automation push, Ribeiro cautioned that most carriers running fewer than 50 to 100 trucks remain early in their AI journey. His advice: start with a paid account on tools like Claude or ChatGPT and use them for repetitive internal tasks — for example, generating standard operating procedures from a brain dump of notes — before attempting broader workflow automation.

He stressed that paid accounts matter for data security, calling it one of the first three questions any carrier should put to an AI vendor before signing anything.

For small carriers and owner-operators, the immediate implication is commercial: parallel negotiation shifts leverage in hard-to-cover loads, automated document checks reduce costly admin errors, and voice tools chip away at driver churn. As ActionWeave pilots expand and carriers move past the experimentation stage, expect modular AI agents to move from add-on to standard back-office practice across the smaller-fleet segment.