We at Level5Fleet enjoy technology a little more than most. We’ve been known to debate espresso extraction curves and speculate about whether a Roomba could ever be trusted behind a bar.
Which is why a familiar story sticks out.
Imagine ordering takeout through DoorDash, only to have it “picked up” by a courier who never existed. No driver, no delivery, no food. It sounds absurd, because it is. Not because theft is impossible, but because the system itself doesn’t allow the pickup to happen without identity, authorization, and context being aligned inside the platform.
DoorDash doesn’t rely on monitoring or after-the-fact investigation to prevent fictitious pickups. It prevents them structurally.
Freight, for historical reasons, does not.
Over the last few years, freight has seen a surge of AI-assisted booking tools. These systems read emails, parse PDFs, interpret rate confirmations, and respond automatically. From a technical standpoint, it’s impressive work.
From a systems standpoint, it reveals something else entirely.
Most of this automation exists to preserve off-channel communication: email threads, forwarded attachments, phone calls, side conversations. Because that’s where booking and changes still happen. AI isn’t replacing the workflow; it’s compensating for it.
This is less about “using AI poorly” and more about using AI to keep legacy channels alive.
Freight didn’t end up relying on email and phone calls by accident. Those channels solve a real and important problem: they move information across company boundaries.
Shippers, brokers, carriers, yards, and drivers all operate on different systems. Email and phone calls bridge that fragmentation. They let documents move, questions get answered, and exceptions get coordinated when no shared platform exists.
That flexibility is useful. It’s also why these channels persist.
The problem is not that email or phone calls are “old.” The problem is that they were never designed to communicate authorization safely.
An email can carry information, but it cannot:
As a result, authorization sent over off-channel communication inevitably leaks context. Names appear. Relationships are exposed. Approval paths become visible. What started as coordination becomes an attack surface.
This is the common exploit gap: when execution depends on interpreting messages rather than verifying authorization, judgment fills the gap, and that gap is exactly where strategic theft operates.
Email is flexible. That’s also the problem. When execution-critical decisions happen over email, context leaks, authorization becomes ambiguous, and verification moves to humans under pressure.
You can monitor inboxes. You can scan attachments. You can flag anomalies. But none of that changes the fact that execution is occurring outside the system that is supposed to enforce it.
This is why fraud detection, anomaly models, and war rooms emerge. They are not mistakes. They are rational responses to an architecture that cannot enforce correctness at the point of action.
Large brokers didn’t build monitoring centers because they enjoy overhead. They built them because when execution is off channel, someone has to watch everything.
Patterns get analyzed. Lanes get flagged. Suspicious capacity expansions get escalated. It’s sophisticated, serious work. But the very existence of a war room tells you something important: the system can detect risk, but it cannot prevent execution when authorization is wrong.
The alternative is not better monitoring. It’s removing the channel where ambiguity enters. That’s the design principle behind Resolution Requests.
Instead of preserving email as the execution surface and trying to interpret it more accurately, Resolution Requests move execution-binding changes into a controlled, scoped workflow:
This is not about AI replacing judgment. It’s about eliminating the moment where judgment is required.
When changes are handled off-channel, every handoff becomes a trust exercise: Is this request legitimate? Is this person authorized? Is this timing valid?
Resolution Requests collapse that uncertainty. Execution no longer depends on reading between the lines of an email or trusting that context survived forwarding.
The system either confirms authorization—or it doesn’t.
AI is exceptionally good at complex pattern recognition. Using it to interpret fax-like workflows isn’t wrong, it’s just compensating for a deeper constraint. That’s the difference between artificial intelligence and trust infrastructure. The latter changes the flow so fewer decisions need to be interpreted at all.
The future of freight security isn’t smarter inboxes. It’s fewer inboxes involved in execution.
Every industry eventually learns the same lesson: monitoring scales until it doesn’t. Enforcement scales when it’s built into the protocol. Resolution Requests exist because freight reached that inflection point.
Not because people failed. Because the channel did.
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