Alexandra Griffon on How AI Freight Auditing Is Redefining Accuracy for Shippers: Interview with SupplyChainBrain
“Put your audits on auto-pilot. Focus on what matters.”
When AI Meets Freight Auditing, and the Hype Finally Fades
In her recent interview with SupplyChainBrain "Beyond Buzzwords: How AI Delivers Real Value in Supply Chains", BlueCargo’s CEO and Co-Founder Alexandra Griffon didn’t talk about algorithms or automation as abstractions. She talked about shippers and where AI can deliver real value today.
“Freight auditing is where AI stops being a theory and starts delivering value.” ~ Alexandra Griffon
Her conversation with editor Russel Goodman explored what most logistics leaders already sense, or might know: while 60% of supply-chain organizations plan to use AI, only 20 percent have moved forward. That gap translates into real money left on the table, an estimated $1.5 trillion in potential savings that stronger implementation could unlock across global supply chains.
Why Freight Auditing Became the First True Test for AI in Logistics
Freight auditing sits at the intersection of complexity and opportunity. It’s one of the most data-heavy and error-prone areas in global logistics, precisely why Alexandra Griffon calls it the ““perfect first natural use case for AI.”
The reason is simple: 80% of audits today are still performed manually, line by line, rate by rate, across thousands of invoices. Static systems merely match bills to contracts and flag mismatches. They can’t explain why a charge occurred or who was responsible.
“A static audit tells you that you were billed,” BlueCargo’s CEO and co-founder said. “A dynamic audit tells you what happened and why based on the container lifecycle.”
BlueCargo’s AI-powered platform tracks every container throughout its whole journey: port calls, yard dwelling time, holds, chassis moves, and cross-verifies the operational reality against contractual terms. The result is a dynamic audit that identifies the root cause of a fee and attributes accountability with evidence that finance and operations can both trust.
Inside the Dynamic Audit: Four Intelligent Agents at Work
To move from static to dynamic auditing, Alexandra Griffon describes an orchestration of four AI agents working together:
1. Document Processing: instantly extracts and standardizes data from PDFs and emails into structured audit fields.
2. Rates Management: maintains and applies thousands of rate variables (ocean, drayage, accessorials, storage, etc) with a precision that is impossible to achieve manually.
3. Claims & Disputes: compiles the evidence and timeline necessary to generate ready-to-file claims, often acting as a digital dispute agent.
4. Vendor Performance: aggregates line-item insights for carriers and logistics partners, showing where SLAs slipped or processes caused recurring fees.
Each invoice element turns a traditionally manual task into a source of insight and control.
"Instead of chasing errors after payment, shippers can anticipate issues early and are guided by visibility and data-backed accountability." ~ Alexandra Griffon
From Intent to Impact: How Shippers Can Implement AI in 90 Days
Alexandra Griffon emphasizes that adopting AI doesn’t have to be a multi-year transformation, “You can start small and see value fast” she said.
Her framework is built for momentum, a 90-day roadmap that turns experimentation into measurable results:
→ Fund a pilot: Allocate a focused budget to test freight-audit automation.
→ Define three priorities: Target areas where AI can have the most immediate impact for your company, for example, detention, demurrage, or accessorial accuracy.
→ Leverage existing models: Don’t rebuild the wheel.
“No supply-chain company is going to build a better structural model than what already exists,” Alexandra noted. “The key is to use the best technology available and apply it to real supply-chain problems, and startups are already miles deep in that expertise.”
→ Test in production: Track recoveries, dispute resolution time, and vendor insights to validate results before scaling.
Companies that follow this approach report a step change in performance and measurable results: AI-driven freight audit teams achieve up to 3x the efficiency of manual processes, with greater accuracy, faster dispute resolution, and stronger cost recovery at each cycle, for any fees type.
Why BlueCargo Is the Shipper’s AI Partner of Choice
What sets BlueCargo apart is its commitment to listening to the shipper’s side of the story. The platform was built around containerized freight realities, where detention and demurrage are not theoretical penalties but daily budget risks.
“We built BlueCargo to answer the questions shippers actually ask,” Alexandra Griffon said. “Who was responsible for the delay? Could it have been avoided? And can we prove it?”
That clarity transforms International freight auditing. It sharpens financial accuracy, strengthens vendor accountability, and frees teams from weeks of manual reconciliation. Most importantly, it gives operations the confidence to act on facts instead of assumptions.
In a global market defined by volatility, uncertainty, and ongoing disruption, automating freight audits has become a cornerstone of resilience. AI now elevates what was once a back-office process into a strategic control tower for financial accuracy and operational stability.
View From the operational perspective
Operational freight audit sits at the crossroads of finance and operations, where invoice accuracy meets real-world logistics complexity. ~ A. Griffon
In practice, shippers face an exhausting feedback loop: after a traditional audit flags invoice exceptions, operations teams spend hours reconciling detention, demurrage, chassis fees, pre-pulls, and bobtails - each tied to events at the port or yard that are hard to verify after the fact.
For international shippers, this creates costly drag. Limited visibility into when containers are ready for pickup (or return), how long they dwell, or whether a delay stems from the carrier, or the terminal makes accurate budget forecasting nearly impossible.
Finance teams see “exceptions”; operations see an avalanche of manual work. The outcome is friction between departments, slower resolution, and greater exposure to avoidable risk.
By validating operational charges directly against port and drayage events, BlueCargo gives shippers clarity on why a charge occurred, not just that it did. This operational charge validation bridges the long-standing gap between finance and operations, turning hours of manual review into proactive, data-backed control. The result: fewer disputes, faster reconciliation, and a shared understanding grounded in what’s actually happening at the terminal.
A Practical Next Step
"BlueCargo partners with global shippers, supporting them with AI that delivers real value in International freight audit and spend management." ~ A. Griffon
BlueCargo’s 90-day framework provides a clear path to measurable results by helping teams reduce hidden costs, recover lost spend, and improve financial transparency. It’s an opportunity to see how data precision drives financial clarity and how the right technology can strengthen decision-making across finance and operations.
Watch Alexandra Griffon’s full interview on SupplyChainBrain
Interested in exploring this for your organization? Schedule your AI freight-audit consultation →
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