Zencargo lifted files per head by 40% by building shared AI foundations before it automated any workflow. It is a practical lesson in AI in supply chain. Josh Clement-Sutcliffe, Zencargo’s AI & Automation Lead, told the story at aiblLIVE London 2026.
The freight forwarder’s first five automation projects almost all stalled. So it cut four, rebuilt its plan around data, trust and operator feedback, and kept every job. Here is how it worked.
All figures as stated on stage by Josh Clement-Sutcliffe.
They all depended on capabilities Zencargo did not yet have. Each of the five projects tried to automate a whole process. Each needed clean data, a way for operators to see and step into the automation, and automated email. After six months and six engineers, only one project made it out of beta.
It follows a four-stage roadmap: data foundations, trust, partnership and then scale. Shared capabilities such as document parsing, email processing, an audit layer and operator feedback are built once and reused across every workflow. Clement-Sutcliffe warns that skipping a stage turns quick wins into slow outputs with no real return.
It needs to be visible, explainable, and if necessary, also reversible.
Josh Clement-Sutcliffe, AI & Automation Lead, Zencargo
Files per head is up 40%, from 150 to 210, though still short of the 750 target. Zencargo saves roughly 100 operator hours a month. Its AI layer, Luca, parses 30,000 emails and 15,000 documents monthly, and customs clearances succeed on first upload 98.7% of the time. Nobody has lost their job.
Because operators second-guess any system they cannot inspect. Zencargo found that Luca’s updates were accurate, yet operators only noticed them when they returned to upload a document. In fast road freight, context can change before data arrives. That pushed training, adoption and two-way feedback higher up the plan.
Nobody at Zencargo has lost their job. That was never the goal for us.
Josh Clement-Sutcliffe, AI & Automation Lead, Zencargo
Josh Clement-Sutcliffe is AI & Automation Lead at Zencargo, the freight forwarder working to automate global supply chain for its customers. He spoke on the Efficiency track at aiblLIVE London on 20 October 2026.
If your automation projects keep stalling in beta, this is the plan to borrow. The full PDF goes deeper than this page, in the speaker’s own words.
For COOs, operations and supply chain leaders, and AI or automation leads. Six pages, about an eight-minute read.
