5 New Tools to Level-Up Your Freight Strategy

Digital solutions are the future of freight. According to 2024 Gartner research, 72% of supply chain leaders say digital transformation, including adoption of analytics and benchmarking tools, is their top priority for the next three years. And 80% of supply chain organizations plan to invest in real-time freight rate data solutions by 2027. 

Modern solutions don’t just make air and ocean freight simpler, faster, and less error prone. They also help unlock measurable value for your organization. And at Xeneta we’re constantly developing new capabilities to help your team thrive. 

Building on last week's press release and Fabio Brocca’s highly anticipated Product Keynote at the 2025 Xeneta Summit, we’re diving deeper into five game-changing Xeneta tools you can start using right now:

1. AI Agents 
2. Xeneta Indexing Solution 
3. Integrated Rate Management 
4. Carrier Scorecard 
5. Air Monitor 

Read on to learn more.

#1) AI Agents 

Xeneta is known for being the world's largest ocean and air freight intelligence platform. But real, accurate, and up-to-date data is only valuable if you know how to turn it into action.

We wanted to reduce the time it takes for you to turn your data into results, because when the market can change in an instant, you need to keep up. That’s why we created AI Agents — to take in a vast amount of data and turn it into clear recommendations you can act on. 

With Xeneta AI Agents you get regular, auto-generated outcomes and recommended actions either in your Xeneta newsfeed or sent straight to your email inbox. You can choose the frequency, either weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, and select which agents you want to activate: 

• Spend Optimization Agent: Identify lanes where contracted rates are significantly above market benchmarks and recommend alternative carriers or spot bookings.
   
  • Customer Outcome: Lower freight spend, avoid overpaying, negotiate with stronger data.
   
• Supplier Optimization Agent: Flag carriers that are overpriced or underperforming vs. peers (e.g., 10% higher cost with worse reliability).
  
  
  • Customer Outcome: Balance service levels and freight spend.
    
    
• Capacity Planning Agent: Translate supply of capacity (through offered and blanked capacity), schedule reliability and rates to impact on market shifts into actionable insights
  
  
  • Customer Outcome: Stronger negotiation position, foresight into rate movements, better-timed procurement.

AI Agents continuously monitor your trade lanes and suppliers, delivering outcomes unique to your business context. All your data is aggregated and anonymized to keep you secure as you save money, cut risk, and move faster. And we’re continually updating the tool to make sure it’s as valuable as possible with new functionalities like end-to-end procurement orchestration with Agentic AI. 

If you're an existing Xeneta customer, these agents are now available for early access.

The images above show examples of what the platform looks like. They are for illustrative purposes only.

#2) Xeneta Indexing Solution 

The frequent and dramatic swings of today’s freight market mean 12-month fixed-rate contracts are no longer enforceable or viable. When rates drop, shippers want to renegotiate. When rates rise, suppliers may look to renegotiate or even roll cargo in favor of other shippers that are willing to pay more. 

Index-linked contracts offer a more flexible approach. With an index-linked contract, your rate is tied to an external price index — when markets shift, your rates shift too. They remove incentives for either party to break the contract and therefore ensure your goods will get where they’re needed, when they’re needed, and at a fair market rate. And you can sign longer or indefinite contracts, saving you months of renegotiation time every year. 

Index-linked contracts only work if the buyer and seller trust that the index the contract is linked to is an accurate and comprehensive representation of the market. You need shared language and terminology — and impartial and proven data. That’s where Xeneta comes in. 

Our Indexing Solution provides the data, the tools, and the processes you need to manage index-linked contracts as smoothly as possible at every stage. We support you to: 

• Educate with videos, guides, and templates to help you understand index-linked contracts and how you can gain internal and supplier buy-in 

• Simulate with the ability to model different index rules and run backtests on real historical data — identifying the best parameters for your needs and visualizing what they’ll look like during market shifts 

• Execute with our standardized templates and benchmarks to help you negotiate and agree terms within the platform 

• Monitor with automated contract tracking, set rules, and alerts that help you keep on top of any necessary changes and prevent costly mistakes 

Xeneta’s full indexing suite — including Indexing Simulator and Indexing Contract Manager — is available now. It enables a faster, smarter, and more collaborative way to buy and sell freight with confidence. 

#3 Integrated Rate Management 

With so much data from a vast number of trade lanes and multiple carriers, manual rate sheets can very quickly become too complex to manage. Using non-specialized tools like Excel make rate sheets prone to human error, difficult to comprehensively adjust when circumstances like fuel prices change, and can lead to multiple ununified versions across your organization as different departments tweak master rate sheets to their own needs. 

Manual rate sheets also make everything more time-consuming and near-impossible to scale. They’re a product of the past and are no longer viable in today’s market. So, we created Integrated Rate Management, a complimentary, centralized repository for all your door-to-door rates. 

Integrated Rate Management gives you a single source of truth to minimize errors, enables bulk adjustments that derisk the adjustment process, and provides a clear audit trail for any changes made. 

• Procurement teams can drive smarter, data-driven procurement decisions powered by full visibility into trends, supplier performance, and contract optimization opportunities.  

• Logistics teams get a strategic overview of all freight contracts and suppliers with clear visibility into rates, transit time, and service levels. 

• Finance teams get accurate and trustworthy reference data to rapidly validate invoices against contracted rates with access to a full audit trail for every rate change. 

And with every department working from a single source of truth, nothing will be lost in translation. You can unify your processes and enjoy simplified collaboration that supports your organization-wide ambitions. Plus, with a standardized rate sheet template, your team members and your suppliers will know exactly where to find the information they’re looking for, saving everyone time and frustration. 

At present, the Integrated Rate Management (IRM) is only available as part of an early adopter program. Register your interest here to be the first in line for the official launch.

#4 Carrier Scorecard 

Successful freight contracts are widely built on great carrier-shipper relationships. But if you’ve been working with the same supplier for years and are happy enough with the service you get, you may miss out on opportunities with other carriers that could be even more successful.  

Perhaps you want to diversify your partnerships to give you more protection from disruption. Or you’ve spotted another carrier that offers higher schedule reliability at a similar rate to the carrier you usually work with. But maybe your team are wary to reach out to new carriers and disrupt the status quo. You need comprehensive data to back up your position and show exactly how different carriers compare. 

Our new Carrier Scorecard is a customizable, easy-to-use tool that brings rate and performance data together so you can easily compare carriers across the areas that matter most to you. And we’ve recently acquired eeSea, meaning we can add its market-leading global schedule, transit time, and reliability data to our existing range of freight rate data in Carrier Scorecard. All this helps you make faster, more confident carrier selection decisions and improve supplier performance monitoring. 

With Carrier Scorecard, you can select the route you want to assess carriers on, and decide if you’d prefer a cost-focused, reliability-focused, or balanced comparison. You can also adjust the weighting of individual parameters like actual and announced transit times, schedule reliability, offered capacity, carbon emissions, and rate.  

Importantly, if there’s a carrier you haven’t selected, but that achieves a higher overall score across your selected parameters, the tool will highlight it for you — ensuring you never miss an opportunity for a better service. 

You can view your results in a table or graph, share them with your procurement team to get everyone on the same page, and use them in conversations with internal stakeholders like your CFO when you need to justify why you’re selecting certain carriers over others. 

#5 Air Monitor  

The air freight industry is roughly where ocean freight was five or so years ago. It’s incredibly fragmented with various options for shipment type, service level, and delivery speed — on top of rate and capacity fluctuations. And the transparency just isn’t where it needs to be. For airlines, freight forwarders, and shippers to use air freight with confidence, you need comprehensive information of market influencers and movements. 

We wanted to enable strategic decision-making based on wide-ranging, real, and timely data without you needing to repeatedly take the time to bring it all together yourself. So, we created Air Monitor.  

Air Monitor brings air freight data together into a single interface and takes the guesswork out of negotiations. It enables you to be smarter about how you use air freight to increase the resilience of your supply chain while ensuring you’re paying the right price and getting the service level you need. 

With shipper rates and airline rates included in the tool, you can see exactly how the market is moving:  

• Shippers can reference trends in airline rates in their negotiations with freight forwarders and make data-backed cases for rates they feel are fair 

• Freight forwarders get clear visibility into the rates they’re both buying and selling to achieve fair and favorable margins and understand shifts happening at either end 

• Airlines can see both the rate they sell to freight forwarders, and the rate freight forwarders go on to sell to shippers, building this into their freight strategy 

And it’s not just rates, Air Monitor includes load factor and capacity datasets, too. That means you can better understand how supply and demand changes affect capacity, anticipate price increases and reliability issues if dynamic load factor increases, and use dynamic load factor decreases as proof points as you negotiate lower prices. Crucially, with trusted data backing you up, you can confidently justify your decisions to your finance team. 

Confidently navigate the next year of freight 

If you’re a Xeneta customer, you can try out (almost) all of these tools for yourself now, just reach out to your CSM and organize a run-through. 

If you haven’t yet experienced the value Xeneta delivers through our platform, tools, expertise, and community, book a 30-minute demo to see the difference for yourself.

Reach out for a demo today.