Transcription
Hi everyone, my name is Jake Ramo. I put this video together to show you the AI automations and agents that I've built over the past several months to help with my freight brokerage business.
This video is designed to be just a simple demo video to showcase the real-world capabilities of my system. Specifically, I'm going to be walking you through how I use AI to streamline processes in my personal book of business and save time from day-to-day.
Now, while everything that you're going to see in this video is designed specifically for logistics professionals like freight brokers, logistics coordinators, really anyone who's working in the trucking industry. Um, it can be customized and tweaked to work for anyone who works primarily on the computer. So, if your job involves a lot of emailing, scheduling, data entry, that type of stuff, this system can work for you and it can help save you time from day to day as well.
All right, so before we dive in, here's a quick overview of the tech behind everything. I built everything out using N8N's automation platform. It's very similar to Zapier or Make.com. The only difference is NAN is open source, which is why I chose them instead. Um, the AI itself is powered by OpenAI, so chat GPT. The only difference is we're going to be wired directly to our email and Google Sheets, Calendar, other platforms like that. But the nice part is because it's all powered by chat GPT, we can use it just like we we talk to normal chat GPT on their website. We can send over emails to be rewritten in a more professional tone or we can have documents summarized, long threads summarized for us. However you like to use chat GPT now, you can use this system the same exact way.
Okay, so let me show you what a typical day looks like on my end. I'm already showing my screen to you guys. I'm going just walk you through what we're looking at here. The top window here is going to be our email that we're going to be automating. This is a Gmail inbox. You can use Outlook or whatever email provider you like to use. In this instance, we're just going to be using Gmail. The bottom screen is going to be our Google Sheets document. This is going to be my CRM/TMS system that I'm going to be using to organize my data and um, you know, do the the work of a freight broker essentially. So right now we're looking at the dashboard that just kind of summarizes everything. We've got a loadboard tab in here. We've got a carrier database, a customer database, a prospecting list. We've got a contact list of all the people, addresses, a list of available loads that are good to cover, some previously quoted lanes, our completed loads, so historical lanes that we've ran, um, some accounting stuff, and then uh Ryder's memory, which takes me over to the window on the right hand side of the screen, which is our Telegram chat with Ryder. Ryder is going to be our AI agent in today's demo video. He's going to be helping us with our book of business. He's going to be helping us send emails, schedule appointments, um, create rows and other data entry stuff within Google Sheets. We're just going to control that all by basically talking to him in this Messenger app. And we can treat it like he's a team member or an assistant that works for us. and we can um, just talk to him that way simply by typing out messages or we can send him a voice message too which sometimes will save us some time. Um, but looking at the Telegram messenger here we can see we already have a message from Ryder and this is going to lead me into the first automation that I want to demonstrate to everyone. Um, so this is just an automated message that I get sent to me every single day at 7 a.m. This is the morning briefing that I programmed Ryder. He knows what I'm looking for. He knows when I need to send it. I don't have to request anything from him. He just sends it to me. And um, yeah, I'll go ahead and read this every single morning. It just kind of helps me get my baseline for today, helps me establish some to-do list items for the day. And then from there I can talk with Ryder and decide on what we need to work on first. So looking at this message, you can see mine includes a revenue overview, a overview of the active loads on my load board, the overview of the available loads that I need to cover today, and then I'm also getting the weather for Grand Rapids, which is where I'm based out of.
So once I read my morning briefing in the morning and establish some to-do list items, typically the first plan of attack on uh the day is going to be handling the check calls. So if we look over on our load board, we can see the loads that we need to run check calls on. So basically the carriers that we want to reach out to and get updates from and mark in our system what the their current status is. So looking at our load board, we can see I've got basically five loads that I would want to run check calls for. We've got these three green loads that are loaded, waiting to deliver, and then these three or these two tan loads that are dispatched waiting to pick up. In this next automation that I'm going to show you, we're going to automate the check calls by delegating that task to Ryder.
So, if we go over to our Telegram Messenger, I'm going to send him a voice message here. Run check calls for today. So, I just sent him a very short command. I just couple words I sent to him. And that's going to tell him, hey, I need to look at the load board tab here and figure out which loads we need to get in contact with. He's going to get the contact information for the dispatchers. He's also going to look at that load number that they're booked on. And he's going to cross reference that load number in our email. And the goal is to find that load number in our email so he can reply back on that same email chain. because this is all demo information. He's only going to find uh one email chain. It's a one that I I created just to show you that he does do that. But um the automation itself, he's going to create five draft emails for us to send out to our carriers. And those emails are going to be personalized to each one with their name asking for location updates on their drivers, so forth and so forth. We can see we got a message back from Ryder down here. Um, here are the check calls for today, May 30th. And it basically just gives us a list of the loads. And we can see there's five different loads that we are needing to do check calls on today, which is correct. Like I said, if we're looking at our load board here, we can see these are the five loads that he's looking at. And now if we go up to our email and click on drafts and refresh it, we'll now see five new email drafts that Ryder went ahead and created in just a matter of a few seconds. And we can see each one's personalized. It's got the correct load numbers in there. Good morning, Carol. Good morning, Chris. Good morning, Amanda. So, it's sending um personalized messages to the specific dispatchers that are in charge of each each of those loads. And then we can see on this one here, this is the one that I created a fake email chains to for it to reply to. So, it went ahead and it did successfully find that previous email chain and it just created instead of a new email draft, it created a reply email draft and that's what this one is. Normally, check calls is going to take you anywhere between one to two hours to finish up. It really just depends on how many total loads you have that day to get in contact with. But um check calls can for sure be a time-consuming task first thing in the morning which is why um this is something I really wanted to delegate over to Ryder. And we can see in this demonstration he was able to create draft emails to all of our active loads in a matter of two or three minutes. So really saves us time there and it frees us up to spend more time throughout the day now prospecting and looking for new business which is where we're going to move towards now.
I'm going to switch over from my load board to my prospecting list tab. And this is going to show all the prospects that I'm working on. Um, very basic CRM system. We've got the prospect status, last contacted date, follow-up date, company name, industry, location, some other contact information. The most important column in this um prospecting list is going to be the last contacted date. Um, this is just how we're going to keep track and stay organized on when we're contacting each one of our prospects. Making sure we're not contacting someone too frequently or we're not forgetting about someone and leaving someone left behind. This um just helps us stay organized. So, I'm going to show you guys how Ryder can help with prospecting and specifically some email automations.
So, we'll go and we'll look at our prospecting list here. And we'll pick out a prospect that we want to email. I'm going to go with the one at the bottom of the list, Emily Lopez. And I'm simply going to send Ryder a message uh saying, "Draft up an email. Help anything." Okay, so I just sent uh this message over to Ryder saying drafted up an email to Emily Lopez making myself available this week and see if she needs help with anything. That's just going to tell Ryder that, hey, we're trying to create a prospecting email and email our prospect Emily Lopez. He should go into our prospecting list, find the contact information for Emily, and then create the email draft. So, he just sent us a message back saying the email the email draft for Emily Lopez is ready with the message. And let's go ahead and double check that. So, we got a new email draft in our inbox. Let's close this one down. And this is going to the right to contact Emily. Lopez@example.com. Hi, Emily. I wanted to check in and let you know that I'm available this week. If you need help with anything, please don't hesitate to reach out. Best. And I'm gonna remove that because I got my signature in there. So, we just had Ryder draft up this quick prospecting email. And, you know, we could add to it or edit it in any way, but I'm just going to go ahead and hit send on this. So you can see right now the last contacted date for Emily Lopez is 5/16 and it wants us to follow up today. So 5/30 and we went ahead and just followed up with Emily. So it should go ahead and update this last contacted date. Now um and this is a very helpful automation because typically when you're prospecting, you're not just emailing one or two people each day. Typically, when you're working off a list of say 50 or 100 people, you're going to reach out and call or email 20, 30, 50 different people in each day. So, it um when you're doing it that way, it can become a little bit of a tedious task to go in every single time, making sure you're updating the last contacted date, if they want to change the phone number or anything, making sure you update their information correctly. And we can see Ryder went ahead and automatically made that change for us already. So the last contacted date is now showing 5/30 and the new follow-up date is set for June 13th.
And the system doesn't just draft and send emails. Ryder can handle any action within your Gmail that you're you're looking for. So, I'm going to send a message to him here saying uh do I have any oops, any unread emails? All right. So, I sent him that message. Very basic question asking if I have any unread emails. what he should do and go he should go ahead in our email inbox and see we do have two unread emails. Look like he did pick that up and he lists out the two unread emails here. The sender information and now he's asking what we want to do. So, we'll say reply to that email for 6 p.m. So, he just summarized the our email inbox for us, and I'm going to go ahead and have him reply to one of these emails. The one asking if we want to go out to dinner tonight. And I heard it actually just go through here. So, I'm going to go to my sent folder. Let's refresh this. So, we can see in our sent folder now, we have a new email that we just sent out. And that is the reply that we just had Ryder send yes to dinner. Let's do 6 p.m. question mark question mark. Send. Um, and it looks like we still have another unread email in here. So, I'm going to go ahead and tell Ryder to delete that other unread email. So, just a little bit more email management here. Um, just going to have him clear out my unread email inbox. And he confirmed that. So, we'll go ahead and refresh just to double check. And we see that one unread email is now gone. So very helpful with just a few messages. You can get Ryder to send emails for you, reply emails, draft emails, delete emails, whatever you need to do. Um, you know, you don't even need to have your email inbox open. You just have to have access to Telegram, access to talking to Ryder, and he can take care of the rest for you from there.
All right. Next, let's look at some calendar automations and what Ryder can help you with when it comes to scheduling events on your calendar. So, we'll hop over from our load board to our calendar page. See some existing events here on our calendar. Um, just a simple gym day workout. Um, but we're going to go ahead and use Ryder to add some new events and make some changes. So we'll go ahead add a event today at 7:00 p.m. Research AI. So we sent that to Ryder. He's going to take that and he should go ahead and create a new event on our calendar from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. Research AI. You can go ahead and click on that and see we're going to get notified 30 minutes before. Allocate time for researching advancements in AI technology and trends. Boom. Pretty simple. Um, now let's say I changed my mind. I want to reschedule that. You see I when you're typing stuff out, you're going to have some typos, but because you're talking to an AI, he it doesn't really matter. He'll figure it out. Um, so you can see he took that existing event that we had at 7:00 p.m. and went ahead and rescheduled it for tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. Very helpful. Um, another calendar automation that I like to use. So, let's say if you wanted to schedule a meeting with another person, um it will actually go ahead and create the event on your calendar and it will also send an email to that person requesting or sending them the the meeting invitation so they can accept or deny based on that time. So, we'll go ahead and show you that. Please schedule a meeting with Jake Ramo for today at 6 PM. So, it should go ahead and just like the other ones, it'll add the event on my calendar, but on top of that, it's going to go into our contact list and pull the information for myself, Jake Ramo, find my email address, and then it's going to send me a invitation for this meeting. And if you heard that ding just now, that was the invitation coming through. says one guest awaiting a reply on that. Here's my work email saying the invitation was sent there. Um, so pretty cool, very helpful with your calendar.
Next, let's move forward to some quote request and load tendering automation. So we'll hop back over to our load board and let's just pretend that we've received an email from a customer. It just came through. saying, "Jake, I need a a quote on this lane. What's what are you going to charge me to to move something?" So, I've got one of these typed up. I'm just going to copy it copy this message and send it over to Ryder. So, customer sends us an email. Jake, what are you going to charge me for these lanes? And actually, in this instance, there's three different lanes that we're going to be quoting out. So, before I send that message back to the customer with his his rates, I'm going to basically brainstorm back and forth with Ryder and he's going to help me do the calculations here and generate some some quoting numbers. You can see. So, here's Ryder's quotes. Approximately 20,000 pounds per truck. And that looks pretty good to me. Now, what I would do with this, I would basically um take this information and do a little bit more research on my own. Go to say DAT, look at some more historical lanes and compare Ryder's numbers versus what I'm thinking the rate should be. But for example purposes, let's just say these quotes look good. And I'm going to go ahead and tell Ryder to finalize these quotes email. So sent him that message and that's basically going to tell him to hey save those quotes that we're we're finalizing. save those for later so we can look back to those and then take those numbers and draft up an email basically replying to the quote request so we can reply back to our customer saying, "Hey, this is how much it would cost you to move the load from here to here. You know, let me know what you think." So, let's go back to our email and wait for that to come through. All right. So, we can see the quotes for the palletized paper product shipments ready next week are finalized as below. I have drafted the email for your contact with these details per your request. And we can see the draft email pops up right here. And I I can go in same thing as all the other emails that we had created. I can go through and make changes now, edit or remove anything. Um, but it's got my signature in there already. So, that looks good. The other thing that that just did, we'll go down in our Google Sheets file from our prospecting list to our quoted loads. And this is going to add those three lanes that we just quoted. Columbus to Atlanta, Cleveland to Memphis, Evansville to Jacksonville. Puts the miles, all the details, the numbers that we quoted.
Okay. Now that we have an email drafted up with our finalized rates that Ryder came up with, we can go ahead and send this over to the customer who requested it and get his his quotes back. Um, and hopefully we we get some good news back from him saying our quotes look good and we we win some some business from him. Um, but for demonstration purposes, let's pretend that we submitted our quotes and they looked good. We we won the load and our customer replied back by sending us the load details and letting us know to start working on a truck. So, I've got another email I have ready here. Um, this is just a simple email. It's got an attachment in it with a load tender. This is going to have um all the addresses, the pickup numbers that the driver is going to need to successfully run the load. And I'm just going to take this load. It's already labeled as a load tender. I'm just going to mark it as unread. So, what that tells him to do is hop in there, look at the attachment that is in there, pull out all the information. He's going to go to our load board in Google Sheets, and he's going to add a new row, and he'll give it a load number, status. He'll fill out all the details um that it can for that new net new row. It's going to go to our address book and it's going to add any new addresses if we don't have the addresses saved in our system yet. And it's also going to go to our available loads tab and it's going to add a new row here letting us know, hey, we have a new new load to work on, a new load that we need to find a driver to cover. Um, and we can go move move forward from there. All right. And you can see that automation just went through. He went and marked that load tender as unread, saying he took care of it. Created a new row on our load board now. And we can see that load is ready. Here's the lane. We'll go to our addresses and we can see those those addresses have been added to our system in Mckenry, Illinois and Detroit, Michigan. And we'll also go to our available loads tab and see we added a new row here. So we have this to work on this reefer load from Illinois to Michigan pasteurized milk. Looks like the rate's 2350. So just like that, instead of doing all this manually where I'd have to create multiple rows, manually enter in all the details, it's just a simple trigger to Ryder, letting him know, hey, here's the load details. You take care of the rest, and now I can just go and focus on finding a driver to pick up this load.
Okay. So once you have your load built up in your system, it's on my load board now. the addresses have been entered in and um I've indicated to myself that it's it's okay to cover and we're good to work on it. Next plan of attack would be to find a carrier that could I could book and dispatch on this. Um, and I could always go and try looking in my own carrier database, contacting carriers that are homebased in the Illinois area that I've worked with in the past. So I could email these guys or give them a call and try and sell the load that way. um because my personal book of business I work for a I work for myself. It's a very small um business. So most of the carriers that I'm working with on a daily basis. It is the first time I'm doing business with them. So which means I have to qualify them. I have to get them to sign paperwork. Um, I have to double check their insurance. There's a lot of stuff they have to do in order to work with a new carrier. Um, but the fact of the matter is when you're a small brokerage like myself, it's just it's part of the job. So, it's something that I've I've become pretty good at and um have trained Ryder to become pretty good at as well. So, let's walk through this next example. Um, so I use carrier 411 to vet all of my carriers MC numbers. So, I'm going to pull up um this MC. So this is the MC for DHL supply and let's just pretend that we are working on covering this Illinois to Michigan reefer load down here. We posted it up. We get a call from a carrier. We negotiate with them over the phone. Um, agree on a rate and everything works for them and we we all agree that we're we're going to do this load. So, I'm going to go I'm going to get their MC number, look up their MC here in carrier 411. Carrier 411. And basically see in here their MC looks good. And I'm going to go ahead and move forward with booking them. So, before I book them, I have to get them set up in my system. So, typically this is going to be a process that takes 30 minutes to an hour to get a new carrier set up. But I'm going to do I'm going to have Ryder do this for us instead. So I'm going to send him the message saying setup new carrier. Give him the MC number 14530. And I copied the rest of that information from carrier 411. So I'm just going to paste it in there and send that message over to Ryder. So it's he received set up the new carrier MC Excel Incorporated DBA DHL supply chain um and what he's going to do back end. So now I'm in my carrier database. We can see at the bottom of the list here we have a new carrier that's been added in there and that is DHL supply chain. And we've got contact, phone number, email, all this good stuff. if we can go and add their load preference. We'll say any there. And now, boom, they're good to go. They're in our system. We'll also pop over to our email. Oh, not that email. We'll also pop over to our email and look at our email drafts. So, we can see Ryder created two more email drafts for us. The first one is the new carrier setup email I'm going to send to DHL. So, it's going to go to, hey, Mark. Um, attached is the carrier setup packet that I need filled out and sent back. And then here is the attachment. So, that's our carrier setup packet that he needs to fill out and sign. Here's the other documents that I need. Insurance, W9, COI, all that other good stuff. Um, so this instead of me manually typing this up, Ryder created this. All I have to do is hit send on that. This is another email that he created for carrier setup purposes. And this is to request a updated insurance certificate with my company listed as a certificate holder. So once I get the contact for his insurance company, I'm just going to be emailing this to them. And again, personalizes this email, puts in their company name, their city, everything that we need to make that a legit email. Um, so we'll send those emails over to the carrier that we're setting up. We'll wait for their documents to come back. Um, and once we get the green light saying we're good to go, we can book them. We can go over back to our load board now. And we do have to add a customer in here. We'll just put our textiles. So, now that our carrier is set up, we can go and simply select the carrier from our database, which is DHL Supply. And we'll put the truck pay that we agreed at. Say maybe $2,000. It's going to auto calculate the margin on there, auto populate the dispatcher, dispatcher phone number, dispatcher email. Everything's good to go there. I can mark that as a covered load. So now we're good to go. The next step here is going to be sending the carrier a rate confirmation. So a contract on the load. And then once they accept that contract, I'm going to want to follow that up with some dispatch instructions, making sure they have all the necessary details to pick up and deliver this load properly. Let's go ahead and have Ryder do that for us. Um, I'm actually going to change DHL to a fake carrier just because I don't want to I don't want to email DHL. But let's email. So, I sent Ryder this message. Send RC for load number. And that load number is for this one that we just covered. and he's going to send us a response basically saying he needs a little bit more information to create a Raycon. He needs the driver information, truck and trailer number, some pickup notes, delivery notes, that type of stuff. So, we'll go ahead and type this out. Give it to him real quick. Okay, so now I have all this information typed out for Ryder. I'm gonna go ahead and submit that to him. And that's going to give him enough information to create a Raycon and send that over to our carrier. And in this instance, it's myself I put on this one. So, it's going to be sending it to me. Um, and we can see we got another message back saying good to go to dispatch on this load number. And what that means is he said the Raycon is basically has been created and it's ready. And he's basically asking, hey, has that Raycon been signed yet? if it has been signed, can I dispatch him? Um, and we can look at our email drafts and we can see the email that he's talking about. So, rate confirmation load number 13813244, which is the one that we've been working on here, this blue load. And it says, "Hey, Jake Doe," which is our dispatcher in this case, please click carrier confirmation. So, we've got the rate confirmation is attached to this load or this email. And we've got the shipment ID, the pickup date, the pickup city and state, the delivery city and state. And we'll simply just go ahead and send that Raycon over to them. And let's just pretend we sent the the Raycon over to the carrier and they accept it right away. They reply back and send us the signed copy saying, "We're good to go. Will please send us the rest of the uh instructions for the load." So that tells tells me I can tell Ryder, okay, you're good to go to dispatch them on that load. I'm going to hit that approve button down here. We'll hit open. And that's all we needed to do. So that's going to trigger Ryder to create another email for dispatching the carrier. And we can see that one was created. Minimize that. So, here's the dispatch email. Hello, Jake Doe. You should have everything you need to pick up this load in Mckenry, Illinois. Please make sure your driver has the pickup number ready. Signed POD is 100% required. yada yada yada. So, I will go ahead and now send this dispatch email over to the carrier. Um, and basically they're they're good to go now to pick up that load. And you can see on our load board that that row that used to be blue saying it was covered is now tan saying it's been dispatched. Meaning we have sent the carrier all the instructions to pick up the load. He has everything he needs. We're just waiting on their confirmation now to mark the load as loaded.
All right guys, and that is the full end-to-end workflow of everything I wanted to show you guys today. We touched on everything from morning briefings to check calls handled in the morning to some prospecting and quoting. We did some load booking, carrier setups, did some Raycon and dispatching automations. And I do want to point out throughout this video, I did not type a single email myself. I didn't do any data entry or I didn't update any data in my Google Sheets documents at all. Everything has been handled through Ryder with natural conversation in Telegram. Um, it works just like chat GPT, but he's smarter. He's wired directly into the tools that I rely on to do my business. So, email, calendar, Google Sheets. He's got access to everything and it makes him a lot smarter than the standard AI agent or AI system that you're used to using. So because of that, this is more than just automation. This is altogether a freight operations command center and it allows me to save hours of time each and every day. It eliminates the amount of errors that I experience from day-to-day and simply it just frees me up to focus on what drives results and that's building relationships with my customers and moving freight at the end of the day. That's what it comes down to is moving freight. So, um, the more I can delegate these tedious time-consuming tasks to my AI agents, the more time I'm going to have to focus on that important stuff. Uh, I hope you guys enjoyed this video and hope you can find something in the system that will help you throughout your day. I do plan on making future videos, some tutorial videos specifically in N8N, showing you guys how to build up your own systems, um, and that type of stuff. So, um, yeah, be sure to leave a like on this video, leave a comment, let me know what you guys are trying to see next, and, um, yeah, we'll see you then. Thanks.