The Assistant and Customer Requests

How to ask the Assistant about your Projects and Load Plans, turn a Customer Request into a Project with calculated Load Plans, and draft the reply, and what the AI does and does not decide.

Cargo Marshal uses AI in two places that you start yourself: the Assistant, which answers questions about your Projects, and Create from request, which turns a customer’s message into a Project. Both follow one rule. The model reads and explains. The solver guarantees. Every placement, Unit count, Unloaded reason, and warning comes from the same engine that Calculate uses, and no number a model writes reaches a Cargo Line or a Load Plan unchecked.

Ask the Assistant

The Assistant reads. It cannot create or change a Project, a Cargo Line, or a Load Plan, and it cannot run Calculate. Planners can send messages. Viewers can read the organization’s chats.

1. Open Assistant in the sidebar for a chat across your Projects. To ask about one Project, open the Project and choose Ask AI (Ask about this project) instead. That chat sees only the cargo and Load Plans of that Project. Choose Open in Assistant to continue it in the full view.
2. Write the question, or pick one of the suggestions, for example “Why wasn’t everything loaded?” or “How full is each unit?” In a Project chat, Ask about the open Load Plan limits the question to that plan. Ask without removes the plan again.
3. Read the answer. Used N tools lists what the Assistant looked at, such as the Project, its Cargo Lines, or a Load Plan.

The Assistant can search Projects, read a Project and its Cargo Lines, list and read Load Plans, read the result of the last Calculate, compare Load Plans, and search the Cargo library and the Equipment library. It answers in the language you write in, with the words the app uses.

What to expect:

• Numbers such as utilization are copied from the Calculate result. The Assistant does not compute them, and it does not describe coordinates or how cargo sits inside a Unit.
• If a Load Plan is Out of date, the answer says so first.
• When a question needs a Calculate, for example how many pallets fit in a 40 ft container, the Assistant does not guess. It tells you which steps to take in Cargo Marshal.
• It declines questions about routes, legal advice, billing, pricing, and general knowledge.
• When you compare Load Plans, it describes the differences and does not pick a winner.

You can attach images to a message. Web search and extra models depend on your plan.

Suggested fixes for cargo that did not load

When a calculated, current Load Plan has Unloaded cargo, the Warnings area offers up to three Suggested fixes, such as allowing another Unit, swapping in larger equipment from your library, or relaxing a Loading Rule. The solver tries every fix on a copy of the plan first and shows only fixes that load more cargo, with its own numbers. A plan with AI also gets a short AI explanation per fix. The explanation never adds or changes a fix. Nothing changes until you choose Apply, and applying recalculates the whole plan, including locked and moved pieces.

Create a Project from a Customer Request

A Customer Request is the message in which a customer asks how their cargo can ship: an email, a letter, a PDF or photo of an inquiry, or a packing list spreadsheet.

1. Open Home, choose New, then Create from request. You can also drop a file on the Home page.
2. Paste the email text, or upload a file. Cargo Marshal reads PDFs (PNG, JPEG, and WebP images too) up to 4 MiB, and pasted text up to 50,000 characters. Choose Read with AI. A long PDF can take up to a minute, and Stop cancels the reading. A spreadsheet (.xlsx or .csv) is read without AI by the regular cargo import. If it has several sheets, you choose the one with the cargo.
3. On Review, check the Project details. Values marked AI draft were read from the request: project name, customer, origin, destination, reference, and delivery date. A delivery date is filled in only when the request names one unambiguous day. A week or a range stays as text for you. Choose the Mode, Sea or Road, if the request does not say. The pasted text, or the document’s name, is stored with the Project.
4. Check the Cargo table. The regular cargo import reads the AI’s table, with the same column mapping, unit handling, and preview as in Import and re-import cargo. Rows with errors are left out, and you can add them later in the Project. Choose Create project with N cargo lines.
5. On Options, Cargo Marshal proposes up to three equipment options for the Mode. It calculated each one with your cargo, and shows the Units, the volume, the payload, and how many pieces are loaded. Choose the options you want as Load Plans and choose Calculate N plans. The first two options are preselected. If you came straight from step 4, the Project has a Mode, and the best option loads everything, Cargo Marshal creates and calculates that plan without a click.
6. On Result, the table lists the Load Plans with their status. Open a plan, compare two plans, or open the Project.

Draft the reply

1. Under Reply to the customer, choose the Load plan for the reply. It must be calculated and current.
2. Tick Add a share link if the reply should include a View only Share Link. It counts against your plan’s Share Link allowance.
3. Choose Draft reply, then copy the subject and the message into your email.

The model writes the email text and never a number. It uses placeholders such as the equipment, the volume utilization, and your reference, and the server fills them in from the stored Load Plan. A draft that contains a number of its own is rejected and asked for again. If the second draft also fails, you see an error and no text. Cargo Marshal sends nothing. You edit and send the reply yourself.

What can still go wrong

The model can misread a document. A flagged cell is a hint, not a guarantee, and an unflagged value can still be wrong. Compare the Review step with the request before you create the Project. After that, everything goes through the same validation as manual input.