AI systems for operations-heavy businesses
The structure underneath.
Keelson builds AI systems that take high-volume inbound work off operations teams — quote requests, status enquiries, document chasing, the follow-ups nobody has time for.
Most companies are paying salaries to do work a system should be doing.
It rarely shows up as a problem, because it never shows up as a line item.
In freight forwarding it shows up as headcount. Quote requests. Booking confirmations. “Where is my container.” Chasing customs documents. Arrival notices. Thousands of messages a week that all need reading, understanding and answering.
So the team grows. And reply times slip anyway.
What we automate
Nine things we take off your team
Every one of these starts as an email someone has to read. See how each one works →
Not a chatbot. Not a pilot.
A production system. It reads the message, works out what it actually wants, retrieves the right information from your systems, drafts or sends the reply, escalates the cases that genuinely need a person, and tells you when it isn't sure.
INGEST
Messages arrive wherever they already arrive.
UNDERSTAND
Intent, entities, urgency. What is actually being asked.
RETRIEVE
The answer, from your systems. Structured and unstructured.
ACT
A drafted reply, or the action itself.
ESCALATE
Anything it can't support with evidence goes to a person.
Built at 10,000 drafts a day.
For the past three years I've built and operated systems like this at enterprise scale. The largest autonomously drafts over 10,000 email replies a day across eleven business portals — twelve coordinated agents, sub-two-second responses, hallucination guardrails, full monitoring.
It removed 70–80% of the manual work in that process, measured by the business rather than by me.
Most AI pilots don't fail because the model is bad. They fail because nobody built the evaluation harness, the guardrails or the monitoring that keeps the thing honest once real volume arrives. That's the work I'm good at, and it's the least glamorous part of this field.
10,000+
drafts per day
11
business portals
12
coordinated agents
70–80%
manual work removed
Process
What actually happens
Week 0 · Call
Fifteen minutes.
You describe one process end to end. I ask six questions and mostly listen. No pitch, no price on this call.
Week 1 · Audit
One week, fixed fee.
One workflow mapped end to end, costed in hours and salary, split into what's judgement and what's lookup. You get a blueprint and an honest recommendation — including not to proceed, if the numbers don't support it. Yours to keep either way.
Weeks 2–3 · Build
Ingestion, understanding, retrieval.
The system starts reading your real messages and finding the right records. You see output from week two, not week five.
Weeks 4–5 · Harden
Evaluation set, guardrails, escalation path, review interface.
This is the half that decides whether the thing survives contact with a Tuesday.
Ongoing · Care
Monitoring and improvement.
Models get deprecated, inputs drift, new edge cases arrive. Someone keeps it accurate.
AI OPERATIONS AUDIT
One process mapped end to end, costed properly, with a technical blueprint for automating the automatable share. Includes an honest recommendation not to proceed if it doesn't pay. The fee is credited in full against a build.
1 WEEK · $500–1,500
WORKFLOW AGENT BUILD
One high-volume process automated end to end: ingestion, classification, retrieval, drafting or action, a review interface your team actually uses, an evaluation harness, and monitoring.
3–5 WEEKS · $3,000–8,000
CARE & IMPROVEMENT
These systems drift. Models get deprecated, inputs change, new edge cases arrive, costs creep. Someone has to keep them accurate.
MONTHLY · $1,500–4,000
Reasonable questions
Q1What happens when it gets something wrong?
It escalates. Every draft is scored against named guardrails before release, and anything the system can’t support with retrieved evidence goes to a person instead of going out. On the largest system I’ve run, no non-compliant draft was ever released. A system that says "I don’t know" is inconvenient; one that invents a delivery date costs you the account.
Q2We already use CargoWise. Does this replace it?
No, and you shouldn’t want it to. Platform vendors want you to move onto their system. I automate the process you already run, inside the tools you already use. Your TMS stays where it is — the system reads from it and writes back to it.
Q3How long does a build take?
The audit is one week. A single workflow, end to end, is three to five weeks. Anything longer on a first engagement usually means the scope was never properly defined.
Q4What do you need from us?
For the audit: one 45-minute session with whoever runs the process, and around 20 anonymised real examples. For a build: read access to the relevant systems, and one person who can answer questions about edge cases. That’s the real constraint — not the technology, but access to someone who knows why the exceptions happen.
Q5Are you going to make our coordinators redundant?
That hasn’t been my experience and it isn’t the pitch. On the largest system I’ve built, nobody was laid off. The team stopped answering the same status enquiry for the four-hundredth time and started handling the exceptions — the escalations, the difficult customers, the shipments that have genuinely gone wrong. If your plan is to cut headcount, you should know the exceptions still need people, and they’re the hard part.
Q6What if it doesn't work?
The audit exists to answer that before you spend on a build, and sometimes the answer is that it isn’t worth automating. Under roughly £15,000 a year of labour, the build and its upkeep cost more than the problem. I’ve said so before and I’ll say so again.
Q7Who am I actually hiring?
One engineer. I designed, built, deployed and now operate a twelve-agent system that autonomously drafts over 10,000 email replies a day across eleven business portals — architecture through to monitoring, alone. You get that person, not an account manager and a delivery team.
A keelson is the internal beam bolted along the top of a ship's keel, running the length of the hull. Every rib ties into it. It is what makes a hull one structure instead of a pile of timber.
Nobody ever sees it.
If you're hiring people to keep up with inbound volume, that's usually a solvable problem.
Happy to spend fifteen minutes looking at how it works at your company and tell you whether automating it pays. No pitch.
hello@keelsonstudio.comWorking with freight forwarders, 3PLs and operations-heavy teams across the UK, UAE and Australia.