Data from 22 European and 10 US forwarders tells a story their TMS vendors won't. By Bogdan Ivtsjenko, Founder of Logentic.
At this year's transport logistic in Munich, in between the booth presentations by CargoWise, Descartes, and WiseTech, I asked twelve mid-sized European freight forwarders — between 20 and 150 employees, sea and air specialists, operating across the Benelux, Germany, and the UK — a simple question:
"How much of your daily document processing is handled automatically versus manually?"
The median answer: 8%. Not 80%. Eight.
Then I asked the same question to ten mid-sized US forwarders via Zoom over the following two weeks. The median there: 43%.
The gap is not subtle. It is eighteen months — arguably longer — of divergence in operational AI adoption. It is the gap between a team of twenty operations staff at a Hamburg forwarder manually rekeying pickup instructions from Outlook into CargoWise, and a team of twenty at a Chicago forwarder where an AI agent has already parsed, classified, and entered 43% of those instructions before anyone sat down with coffee.
What explains this, and what happens next, should be the conversation dominating European freight forwarding right now. Instead, the conversation is dominated by TMS implementation roadmaps that won't deliver for another eighteen to thirty-six months.
There are three structural reasons, in order of impact:
CargoWise dominates European mid-market freight forwarding for a reason: its depth of integration with ports, customs systems, and financial modules is genuinely impressive. Descartes does the same in a different flavour. Both vendors, and their smaller regional counterparts, have spent the last decade building integration, not automation.
There is a vast difference. Integration means your TMS talks to Portbase, to the customs authority's filing system, to DHL's track-and-trace API. Automation means your TMS reads a PDF manifest that a Polish supplier emailed your ops team at 11pm and creates the booking without human intervention.
The first is what European vendors have built. The second is what American mid-market vendors have been retrofitting on top of their systems for the last twenty-four months, often by acquiring specialist AI companies.
A US mid-sized forwarder typically buys new software on a six-to-twelve-month cycle with decision-makers operating under direct P&L responsibility. A European mid-sized forwarder, particularly in Germany and France, typically requires eighteen to twenty-four months of procurement with committee-based decisions, legal reviews under local-language contracts, and works-council consultation.
This is not inherently bad. It produces careful decisions. It also means that by the time a Dutch or German forwarder signs a contract with a 2024-era AI solution, the 2026 solution is already shipping in North America.
European shippers — particularly those operating within the single market — have historically accepted slower document turnaround because almost nothing was electronic until quite recently. The post-pandemic step-change in shipper expectations (hello, Amazon customer) has hit European forwarders later than their US peers. When your customers tolerated a three-day turnaround in 2019, you didn't need AI. When your customers now demand same-afternoon shipping confirmations, you do.
The gap is not evenly distributed. Large global forwarders (DHL Global Forwarding, Kuehne + Nagel, DSV) have their own internal AI teams and significant investment capacity; they are closing the US-EU gap through hiring. Small local hauliers with ten employees don't feel the gap because their volumes are small enough to manage manually.
The squeeze is on mid-sized forwarders between 20 and 200 employees — particularly those specialising in ocean or air freight where document complexity is highest. A 50-person Rotterdam ocean forwarder handles roughly 6,000-8,000 documents per month across bills of lading, commercial invoices, packing lists, certificates of origin, insurance documentation, and customs filings. With 8% automation, that is 5,500-7,300 documents per month arriving in inboxes, being manually classified, extracted, and rekeyed.
At roughly €4 in fully-loaded operations cost per document handled manually (conservative: this includes salary, errors, rework, and management overhead), that is €22,000-€29,000 per month in administrative cost at a single mid-sized forwarder. Annualised: €260,000-€350,000. For a firm with €10M revenue, this is the difference between a 6% EBIT margin and a 9% EBIT margin.
Multiply across the 400-500 mid-sized sea and air forwarders operating in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany alone, and the aggregate annual cost of the AI gap reaches well over €100 million.
One European segment is closing the gap faster than any other: UK customs brokers operating in the post-Brexit landscape.
Before 2021, a UK-based forwarder moving goods between Dover and Calais needed essentially zero customs documentation. After January 2021, every shipment requires a full customs declaration in both directions. The UK's HMRC recorded a 5-to-6x increase in customs declarations filed in 2021 versus 2019. The industry was caught flat-footed. Existing customs brokers could not scale headcount fast enough.
The response was telling: a new cohort of UK customs brokers was founded between 2021 and 2024, many of them digitally-native operations with five-to-thirty staff. Because they were not burdened by legacy TMS implementations, they built their operations on AI-first document processing from day one. Several of the fastest-growing among them now handle 500-1,000 declarations per day with teams of fewer than ten people — a productivity ratio that would have been unimaginable in 2019.
These UK players are, quietly, the most productive freight-forwarding operations in Europe. Their model is reproducible by continental forwarders. Few continental forwarders are paying attention.
The US-EU gap will close. The question is whether mid-sized European forwarders are the ones who close it, or whether they wake up in 2027 to find their larger competitors have done it at their expense.
My prediction: the winners in European freight forwarding over the next two years will not be the forwarders with the best TMS. They will be the ones whose operations directors moved first on layered AI automation, bought small-scope solutions rather than waiting for TMS vendors to ship their own answers, and measured operational productivity quarterly rather than annually.
The best place to start that shift is in the middle of the market, where the pressure is greatest and the implementation cost is lowest. Whether European forwarders take that opportunity, or watch it pass, is a decision being made right now in board rooms from Rotterdam to Hamburg.
The data suggests it is mostly being ignored.
Bogdan Ivtsjenko is the founder of Logentic, which builds AI agents for freight-forwarder operations. He is based in Rotterdam and writes about AI adoption in European logistics. Find him on LinkedIn: /in/ivtsjenko.
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