Airfreight has spent years carrying the reputation of being slow to adopt new technology, but Matt Petot, chief executive of CargoAi, believes that view is now outdated.
A decade ago, he says, the criticism may well have been justified. Today, however, the sector has made up significant ground and now compares much more favourably with other industries facing similar operational complexity.
Petot began his career in logistics with freight forwarder Schenker before moving to Air France KLM Martinair Cargo. He later left the air cargo sector and worked for Dyson in Singapore, where he was exposed to digital tools for visibility, supply chain management and customer relationship systems that were largely absent from airfreight at the time.
A later conversation with a friend still working in the industry made him realise how little had changed in cargo during his absence. That gap, he says, was the starting point for CargoAi, which he launched to bring more modern digital capability into the market.
Today, the platform works with 105 airlines and 27,000 freight forwarders. According to Petot, a forwarder using CargoAi can typically receive quotes from around ten carriers for a single shipment. In France, he estimates the platform includes the vast majority of forwarders and is involved in 30% of all-airfreight bookings.
For him, that is proof that airfreight can no longer be dismissed as non-digital. The long-standing claim that the sector was too fragmented, with too many handoffs between airlines, handlers, truckers and forwarders, may not tell the whole story. In Petot’s view, the real issue was that the industry had become too inward-looking and lacked enough outside perspectives to challenge old habits.
Even now, some players are still behind, but his message to them is straightforward: waiting is no longer an option. He says the pace of change has accelerated so much that businesses still relying on paper and phone calls risk falling too far behind.
Excuses such as limited budgets, lack of management time or technical difficulty no longer carry the same weight, he argues. Digital integration has become much simpler. CargoAi recently connected an airline to its system in just two weeks, demonstrating how far implementation timelines have come down.
What began as a marketplace linking airlines and forwarders has now evolved into something much broader, especially as artificial intelligence becomes more central to logistics decision-making.
Petot notes that the roots of AI go back much further than many assume. The term itself dates to 1955, when John McCarthy coined it to describe a field of study based on the idea that aspects of human intelligence could be precisely described and replicated by machines. From there, machine learning developed into a practical way of using data to identify patterns and predict future outcomes, such as rates, load factors or market shifts.
What AI adds, Petot says, is the ability to turn those insights into something usable for the average person without requiring them to interpret vast amounts of raw data.
The next major development, in his view, will be the widespread arrival of AI agents over the next three years. These systems, he says, will go well beyond simple automation. In airfreight, they could function like virtual salespeople able to understand shipment context, answer operational questions, explain concepts such as chargeable weight and hold natural conversations with customers.
He believes the technology will be able to handle phone calls and emails in a far more capable way than today’s basic bots. Airlines shown these capabilities have been deeply impressed, he says, particularly by AI’s ability to provide shipment status, packing list details and other practical information in a usable format.
That could remove many of the daily pain points in airfreight, such as discovering too late that cargo has missed a flight. AI could flag those issues automatically, allowing forwarders and airlines to respond sooner.
Still, Petot does not believe human involvement will disappear. Systems must allow more complex or sensitive cases to be escalated to real people, especially for high-value shipments, delicate cargo or major rate negotiations where personal interaction still matters.
He also rejects the idea that AI will necessarily trigger mass redundancies across airfreight. In a sector already struggling to recruit and retain talent, he says the more realistic outcome is that AI will absorb repetitive back-office tasks while human teams focus more on relationships, exceptions and higher-value work.
In that sense, he sees AI not as a threat to airfreight, but as a tool that could finally allow the industry to operate with greater efficiency while preserving the human touch that remains essential in many parts of the business.
