If you only look at the RFQs, you miss most of the inbox. A working freight desk runs on operational mail: a request for the bill of lading draft, a question about ENS documents, a chase on a shipment already in transit. None of these need a price, and treating them like quotes would be worse than useless.
So the first thing a co-pilot has to do is triage. SHIPO reads each incoming message and decides what it actually is. A genuine RFQ becomes a priced quote. An operational request becomes a lightweight ticket with a suggested reply, no price attached, drawn from how the desk has handled the same ask before.
Precedent, not improvisation
The value in operational mail is consistency. There’s usually a right answer to “can you share the B/L draft and ENS info” and it’s the answer you gave last time. By grounding the suggested reply in past handling, the co-pilot keeps responses consistent across operators and across days, without anyone re-deriving the procedure from scratch.
Same principle throughout
It’s the same idea that runs through the whole product. Do the repetitive recognition and drafting automatically, surface the relevant precedent, and leave the operator to review and send. Quote or not, the human stays in control, and the inbox stays under control.