Frostbox Logistics · Refrigerated trucking
The dispatcher who stopped living inside the load boards
Frostbox Logistics is a solo-founder refrigerated trucking business in Oregon. Pacific AI Tech set up a local Hermes agent on a Mac mini to watch load-board opportunities, draft bids, negotiate in the founder's voice, and ask for approval before driver dispatch.
What we can responsibly claim
A short ledger of observable changes, cadences, and control points approved for publication.
The agent now runs scheduled searches instead of asking the owner to sit in front of a laptop for most of the day.
Hermes refreshes the load search throughout the day against the fleet's lanes, size constraints, and refrigerated freight requirements.
The system prepares the work, but the founder still approves confirmed loads before driver instructions go out.
The work before the work
On paper, Frostbox Logistics is in the refrigerated trucking business. In practice, the founder's day was being consumed by the work around the freight: checking load boards, watching rates move, calling and emailing brokers, then doing it again before a truck rolled home empty.
That kind of work is hard to hand off. It is repetitive, but not simple. A good bid depends on lane, timing, equipment, temperature sensitivity, driver position, and the founder's sense of what a fair rate sounds like in a real conversation.
A local agent, not a replacement dispatcher
Pacific AI Tech set up Hermes on a Mac mini inside the business instead of sending the workflow into another monthly software platform. The agent was taught the company's operating region, the fleet's constraints, and the founder's own negotiation habits.
Every few hours, Hermes checks available freight through Truckstop and DAT. It filters for the loads Frostbox can actually run, prepares bids, drafts negotiation emails, and keeps working the thread until there is something worth putting in front of the owner.
The empty-mile problem
The second half of dispatch starts before delivery. By reading location and route context from Motive, Hermes can see when a truck is nearing its destination and begin looking for return freight a day or two ahead of arrival.
That matters for a small refrigerated carrier in Oregon and Washington. Empty miles are not just wasted fuel. They are time, driver capacity, and cold-chain equipment moving without a paying load.
The founder is still the founder
The automation does not send a truck on its own. When the bid is ready and the paperwork is in motion, Hermes messages the founder on iMessage. He approves the load, and only then does the system notify the driver with pickup, destination, and load details.
The result is not a founder removed from the business. It is a founder moved up a level: away from constant refresh-and-reply work, back toward judgment, relationships, and time with family.
Operational record
The point was never to let software run the company. The point was to give the founder a dispatcher that could do the waiting, watching, drafting, and reminding while he stayed in charge.
What needed to change
The founder was spending five to six hours a day searching load boards, sending bids, negotiating rates, checking driver routes, and trying to keep trucks from returning empty. The business needed more coverage without turning the owner into a full-time dispatcher.
What we built and taught
- Installed Hermes on a dedicated Mac mini so the dispatch workflow could run locally, under the founder's control.
- Connected Truckstop and DAT, then constrained searches by Frostbox's refrigerated fleet, preferred lanes, and Pacific Northwest operating region.
- Encoded the founder's bidding and negotiation style into reusable agent instructions so emails sound like the operator, not a chatbot.
- Connected route visibility from Motive's GPS and ELD system so Hermes can begin return-load searches before a truck reaches its destination.
- Kept the final decision human: when a load is ready, Hermes sends the founder an iMessage approval request before driver details and paperwork move forward.
What changed
- Load discovery, first-pass bidding, follow-up emails, and return-load scouting now run as scheduled jobs throughout the day.
- The founder spends less time refreshing load boards and more time deciding which work is worth taking.
- Drivers receive approved load details after the founder confirms the plan, preserving human control over dispatch.
- A separate outreach job contacts past customers when trucks are empty, turning old relationships into another freight source.