What platform engineering means in freight forwarding, and how AI makes it real

Freight forwarding moves ~80% of what we touch, yet the industry still runs on inboxes, Excel files, and heroic humans patching exceptions in real time. So what does platform engineering actually mean in logistics, and why is AI the thing that finally makes it workable?

Kaspar talks with Erik Muttersbach (Forto co-founder, now building Zauber) about the last decade of trying to digitize freight forwarding from the inside, and why “automation” in shipping is nothing like automation in software. They explore the core value streams of a forwarder, how humans currently steer each step, and where AI agents can already outperform people by an order of magnitude.

They also get into the gritty reality of legacy transport systems, API gatekeeping, and why GenAI may be the fastest path to cleaner operational data the industry has ever had. Finally, they zoom out to the workforce and geopolitical stakes: how roles shift when “tribal knowledge” becomes executable by machines, and why Europe can’t afford to sleepwalk into the next industrial revolution.

In this episode:

Why logistics is uniquely hostile to rigid automation, and perfect for adaptive AI
The “human orchestrator” model vs. the coming AI control-tower setup
Where agents win today: quoting, order validation, document checks, data entry
Why process excellence becomes real once AI is the workforce
The external-effects problem in artisanal ops (and how platforms remove it)
What freight forwarding can teach platform teams about exceptions at scale
The bigger picture for Europe’s economic resilience

💬 AI doesn’t just speed up work, it forces organizations to confront their actual processes