At Carrier Logistics' Oct. 9 user conference in Chicago, the firm and LSP44 unveiled a live API that hunts down LTL freight when tracking numbers fail, a fix for the $10-a-case problem of broken lookups.

Carrier Logistics and LSP44 said the jointly developed tool is live. It pairs Carrier Logistics' freight-management software for less-than-truckload carriers with LSP44's AI agent and API infrastructure for logistics service providers.

Rather than requiring a valid PRO number, the API accepts other shipment details: company names, delivery locations, freight descriptions and approximate dates. The system searches about a week's worth of shipment records and ranks potential matches by origin, destination, ZIP code and other characteristics.

What does the API actually do?

The tool targets the failure point that arises when a shipper or third-party logistics provider lacks a valid shipment identifier. Traditional tracking APIs rely on a PRO number to find freight. When that number is wrong, the carrier's system cannot locate the shipment, and the customer falls back to phone calls or emails handled manually by carrier staff.

"We've opened up the API to accept not just a pro number, but description of the shipment, an approximate date, where it's getting delivered, and the names of the parties," Carrier Logistics President Ben Wiesen said.

The AI then ranks candidates by accounting for discrepancies in the available data. The system might recognize a shipment number with two incorrectly transcribed digits as a potential match, or rank a candidate higher when its ZIP code matches even if its listed weight differs from the search information.

How big is the manual-tracking problem?

LSP44 cited RXO data showing its AI agents automated more than 500,000 phone calls in Q1 2026, evidence of AI-driven communications clogging carrier switchboards. At the same conference, LSP44 head of sales Jeremy Estep cited estimates that bot responses can cost motor carriers upward of $10 per shipment.

"The industry has treated manual tracking requests as the cost of doing business for decades. Every carrier running LTL has a customer service team absorbing that cost today," said Nick Ruggiero, LSP44's head of product.

Wiesen framed the issue from a carrier perspective. "If both parties don't know what the tracking number is, then that electronic communication fails," he said.

Why not just add more bots?

Wiesen questioned the logic of layering more AI agents on top of broken upstream communications.

"We could put voice bots on our side to answer voice bots on your side, and email-responding AI to email it. But why? Why can't we just solve the bottleneck and the fundamental problem?" he said.

The companies did not disclose how many carriers or customers would participate. Carrier Logistics said the API is password-protected and uses account-specific credentials, restricting searches to validated accounts.

What does this mean for the wider LTL visibility push?

The partnership arrives as the LTL industry works on common standards for exchanging shipment data. The National Motor Freight Traffic Association's Digital Standards Development Council has published an In-Transit Visibility API standard covering pickup, in transit, out for delivery and delivered milestones.

Carrier Logistics and LSP44 are tackling a related but distinct problem. Standardized data formats help systems talk to each other; the new collaboration tries to identify the shipment itself when the tracking number supplied in a request is missing or wrong.

That gap matters for shippers and 3PLs running freight across multiple carriers and software platforms. A system can send an API request successfully and still fail to retrieve the intended shipment if it cannot match the available information.

The API's impact will hinge on how accurately it identifies freight from incomplete records and whether those matches reduce manual tracking inquiries. Wiesen acknowledged the open question.

"We can't be sure it's going to stop all the phone calls until we implement and deploy it," he said.

Adoption rates and call-volume reductions in the coming quarters will determine whether the API becomes a niche tool or a baseline expectation across the carrier-network industry.