Shipment exception detected.
Nobody acted on it
for 48 hours.
- Carrier exception notifications arrive continuously across hundreds of open shipments — delays, misdirections, customs holds, damage reports. A team of ten cannot monitor five hundred shipments simultaneously, so exceptions wait until someone reviews the tracking dashboard.
- Every hour between exception detection and resolution is cost — expedite fees, missed delivery commitments, downstream production stalls, and customer escalations that trace back to a notification nobody saw in time.
- The exception handling workflow is fully defined: identify the cause, contact the carrier or customs broker, escalate to the supplier if needed, update the downstream stakeholder. The only variable is how quickly someone starts it.
A carrier flags a customs hold on a time-sensitive shipment at 6pm. The logistics coordinator is not monitoring the dashboard. By 9am the next morning — 15 hours later — someone reviews the exception report and sees it. They contact the customs broker. The broker needs documentation. The shipment has been sitting for two days before resolution begins.
The downstream production line that needed the shipment has already adjusted. The expedite fee is unavoidable. The customer has already called.
The customs hold is flagged at 6pm. The AI agent detects it within minutes, identifies the required documentation, contacts the customs broker with a structured request, and notifies the logistics team and downstream stakeholder — all before the team goes home.
By 9am, resolution is already in progress. The broker has the request. The stakeholder is informed. The agent continues monitoring for the broker's response and escalates if the resolution timeline approaches the delivery commitment.
What AI agents resolve
across your shipment portfolio.
| Exception Type | What the AI Agent Does | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Transit delay | Detects the delay notification, identifies the revised ETA, contacts the carrier for cause and updated timeline, and notifies the downstream stakeholder with a structured update and contingency options. | Downstream teams informed within the same event cycle as the carrier notification. Contingency planning begins before the delay becomes a commitment failure. |
| Customs hold | Identifies the hold reason, determines required documentation, contacts the customs broker with a structured request, and monitors resolution against the delivery commitment date — escalating if the timeline is at risk. | Customs resolution begins within hours of the hold notification, not the next business day. Shipments cleared before unnecessary demurrage accumulates. |
| Damage or loss | Initiates the carrier claim workflow — damage documentation request, claim filing, timeline tracking. Simultaneously notifies the supplier for replacement order initiation and the downstream stakeholder for timeline adjustment. | Carrier claims filed within the reporting window. Replacement orders initiated in parallel, not sequentially after the claim is filed. |
| Delivery failure | Detects the failed delivery notification, contacts the carrier for rescheduling, confirms the new delivery window with the recipient, and updates downstream systems with the revised ETA. | Redelivery scheduled same day as failure notification. Recipients informed without requiring logistics team involvement. |
| Portfolio-level monitoring | Monitors all open shipments across all carriers simultaneously. Surfaces shipments approaching delivery commitment dates with unresolved exceptions for priority handling — before the commitment is missed. | Commitment failures prevented, not reported after the fact. Logistics team focuses on exceptions that require their judgment, not exception discovery. |
Shipment exception agents act on your behalf with carriers, customs brokers, and suppliers. Before operations leadership approves that, they need to know exactly what the agent can do autonomously and what it cannot.
PLRX answer: the agent initiates and monitors. It does not commit. The exception agent can contact carriers, request documentation, initiate claims, and notify stakeholders — all actions that follow a defined process. It cannot approve a substitute supplier, authorise an expedite shipment above a cost threshold, or make a commitments that require procurement authority. Those decisions are surfaced to the appropriate person with full context, not made autonomously.
Authority boundaries are configured per workflow — your procurement policy, your cost thresholds, your escalation rules. The platform enforces them. If your policy says escalate any expedite cost above $5,000, that rule runs in the platform layer, not in the agent's judgment. The agent cannot override it at runtime.
Your logistics team cannot monitor five hundred open shipments simultaneously. PLRX AI agents can.
PLRX AI agents detect carrier exceptions the moment they occur, initiate the resolution workflow within the same event cycle, and notify downstream stakeholders before the impact materialises. Your logistics team handles decisions that require their judgment — not exception discovery.