The acceleration of digitalisation across industries, particularly in aviation, has been a hallmark of the COVID-19 pandemic. Air cargo, where digitalisation had been relatively slow to arrive, is now a hot topic, with the last months seeing briefing days from IATA and ICAO, so we sat down with Matthieu Petot, chief executive of air cargo booking software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider CargoAi, to learn more about how digitalisation is transforming this area of the industry.
“Our main product is an eBooking/eQuote platform that digitises the procurement and distribution process for freight forwarders and airlines,” Singapore-based Petot tells us. “We are also including CO2 calculations on every shipment and built our unique flight schedule database that covers all the airline schedules worldwide.”
CargoAi also uses prediction technology for market capacity and trends, Petot says. “This helps our users to have a better view on how the market is going to evolve in the coming 2-3 weeks, which is the window of bookings in air cargo. This is a huge innovation as air cargo was more used to receiving data 1 or 2 months after the facts — and to look at what happened in the past. This is changing, as we can provide live data and 2 weeks’ forward prediction.”
CargoAi’s customers are the airlines, freight forwarders and general sales agents that would traditionally perform this kind of transaction by email or phone — enquiring about capacity, availability, rates and to make bookings.
This, Petot says with a certain amount of French understatement, “is not very efficient”. Instead, CargoAi combines direct integration with airline systems and modern purchasing techniques on a SaaS, cloud-hosted platform.
“The estimation from airlines is that we save them around 0.10USD/kg for every shipment in term of cost on both side,” Petot says.
With World Bank-published statistics from ICAO and others estimating some 200 billion tonne-kilometres of world air freight in 2018, the prospect of that kind of efficiency is astounding.
Airlines certainly seem to be keen, with customers in the last few months including Etihad Cargo, TAP Air Cargo and Finnair Cargo.
“Making our capacity offering available on CargoAi guarantees visibility and is fully in line with our digitalisation strategy for our sales process,” said Karri Kauppi, head of revenue and pricing at Finnair Cargo, in June this year as the airline entered a partnership with CargoAi. “With CargoAi, we have been moving fast with the integration and we are very happy to be able to provide this service to our customers. We speak the same language and the cargo challenges we face are fully understood and integrated into the tool.”
“Our goal is that a forwarder can do 100% of their transactions on CargoAi,” Petot says.
CargoAi is one of the new generation of as-a-Service (aaS) models, also known as a flexible consumption model (FCM).
“We are full API native and use serverless technology in the cloud. This means that our app is auto-scalable and can adapt to user loads,” Petot explains. “We also don’t have any servers — physical or in the cloud — to maintain.”
CargoAi’s front end is Angular, while the backend stack includes Java, Python and Go.
“It took us 1 year to build our first version that we were happy to share with customers and we are now adding new features every sprint cycle. which is 2 weeks for us. This is very fast and we listen to our users to continuously add what they request,” Petot says.
CargoAi is live in over 60 countries, with global airlines and one of the largest general sales agents, with development accelerating and plans to cover every country worldwide — and more airlines — before the end of 2021.
Recent additions include booking-by-commodity (rather than simply by general cargo plus some functionality to select temperature control), with allotment and full pallet bookings in the near-term pipeline.
Author: John Walton
Published: 23rd November 2021
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