. “There’s no standards in how carriers get paid by shippers, by customers, and you have very little standards on how drivers get paid,” says Beyond Trucks CEO Hans Galland. (John Sommers II for Transport Topics)
April 2, 2026 1:19 PM, EDT
Key Takeaways:
- BeyondTrucks launched RateAgents, AI tools that help carriers calculate freight rates using plain language instead of manual rate tables.
- The first RateAgent focuses on fuel surcharges, with more agents planned for broader rate applications.
- CEO Hans Galland said the approach reduces cost and customization challenges found in traditional transportation management systems.
BeyondTrucks is rolling out freight rate calculation programs that can be customized using simple language, the dispatch management company announced March 31.
BeyondTrucks RateAgents is a series of artificial intelligence agents that helps carriers determine freight rates without the complexities of a manual process with rate tables. The first agent released is specific to fuel surcharges but will be part of a broader portfolio aimed at simplifying freight rates, especially for large and complex carriers.
“As a technology company, we are seeing the best success in AI applications when we define the business problem that carriers have more clearly,” BeyondTrucks CEO Hans Galland told Transport Topics. “There’s no standards in how carriers get paid by shippers, by customers, and you have very little standards on how drivers get paid.”
Galland added that mathematical formulas that carriers traditionally deployed tended to mean using pen and paper or a graphing program to manually calculate rates for billing or for driver settlement purposes. He also pointed out transportation management systems but noted they are either too standard or too expensive to customize.
“Because they’re so unique, it’s very hard to get the right rate functions in a transportation management system,” Galland said. “In the market today, only the big 40-year-old TMS providers had rate table libraries or code libraries that would have reasonable coverage for large and complex fleets. Now that made it very expensive for carriers.”
BeyondTrucks worked around these constraints by ensuring the solution can translate normal language into code that the platform can use.
“You solve that by giving them the tool rather than the solution,” Galland said. “That’s exactly what we did here, and the customer ends up with a product that fits their needs better, but also is actually much more cost efficient.”
The BeyondTrucks RateAgents use large language model technology to provide customized rate solutions, and carriers can test the output before deploying it. The trials aim to prevent mistakes on the part of the agent, alongside internal guardrails and the scope being specific to rates. The custom code essentially fills out the existing program.
