The client is an international freight forwarder on the China–New Zealand lane, handling full container, LCL and customs clearance. We connected agents to Lark Base, the client's own container booking system and company Gmail, delivering three workflows in phases: pre-sales, origin port and destination port. Status is partly live: the pre-sales workflow was delivered in September 2026, with every quote PDF approved by sales support before an order is created. The two port workflows are still in development.
How it worked before
There were no shared rules for order creation, quote approval, risk flags or shipping-instruction hand-off. People confirmed things back and forth in group chats, and that early churn produced a lot of dead orders. A confirmation link posted in a shared group could also be clicked by mistake and change an order. The member system held only an email, auto-generated username, phone and branch, so CRM records were thin.
What AI does now, and what people do
Pre-sales now runs as one line: client record, order, quote, confirmation email, shipping instruction. The key step stays with a person: sales support approves the quote PDF before the order is created and confirmed. Confirmation links go privately, never into a shared group.
- AI does: Creates the client record and order in Lark Base, generates the quote PDF for approval, then sends the confirmation email and drafts the shipping instruction once approved
- People do: Approve the quote PDF and decide whether to create the order; until the port workflows go live, document checks and release decisions are still manual
Timeline
These are the milestones we can verify in the project record.
- 13 Jul 2026Pre-sales process session: the client's business lead shared the process document with AI touchpoints marked; our 5 process questions were answered the same day
- 21 Jul 2026Upload limit raised to 30MB; on 24 Jul switched to a full JSON payload to stop large files being truncated
- 27 Jul – 3 Aug 2026Shipping-instruction field mapping, first built for one carrier, extended to other carriers' formats
- 17 Aug 2026Mid-quarter review: delivery path adjusted, and “cut key steps to about one-third of the time” set as an acceptance target (not yet verified)
- Sep 2026Pre-sales workflow delivered, including non-admin user scenarios
- 15 Sep 2026Stage review of the origin- and destination-port workflows
Current status and limits
Only pre-sales is live. Origin-port pre-alert checks (bill of lading, customs declaration, invoice, packing list) and destination-port ETA and release alerts are in development. The quote judgement card, order dashboard and exception alerts shown earlier were demos or in development, not live. The 17 Aug time target is unverified, so we publish no results figures. Finance tasks are out of scope for this phase.
What we learned
From 19 to 22 Aug 2026, testing kept hitting “app owner only” permission blocks and approver identity mismatches. It took us nearly 4 days to find the cause: different runtime environments were reading different identity profiles. Now, before a multi-agent setup goes live, we check which identity each environment uses.
Scope note: an anonymised case is a summary of project records with client names, people and amounts removed. This page draws on those records; client names, people and amounts are withheld. Dates and figures come from project records and some have not been confirmed in writing by the client. The delivery status is as labelled at the top; results vary with each business’s systems, data and involvement and are not a promise to other businesses.