Our stories.

Aircon provides full transparency into every pricing decision, ensuring each quote is auditable, traceable, and aligned with commercial governance. Unlike generic AI tools that lack explainability, Aircon reveals the logic behind each recommendation...showing applied rules, constraints, and margin impact—while capturing any operator overrides with full context. This builds internal trust, improves pricing consistency, and enables management to review decisions, enforce governance, and confidently scale operations with clear accountability.

In air freight, a quote and a bookable shipment aren't the same thing: a quote is just a price, while a bookable shipment is a commitment the forwarder can truly stand behind. A shipment is only bookable when critical conditions are validated before the quote goes out, including current pricing, intentional margins, operational feasibility, clear responsibility, and visible decision logic. When these checks are skipped, costs surface downstream as exceptions, rework, credits, and eroded trust. The industry's next phase isn't just more automation or faster quoting, but better commitment quality, where the winning forwarders will be the ones who make promises they can actually keep.

In this podcast episode of Next Level Up, Chris Condan, founder of Aircon, explains how his startup is building a "decision layer" for air cargo that gives freight forwarders real-time intelligence at the moment of quoting—margins, route feasibility, and carrier reliability. Drawing on his career from forklift driver to freight forwarding executive, he argues the industry overweights cost when service and reliability are the real differentiators, and sees AI as a force multiplier that frees operators to focus on relationships and higher-value work.

Aircon’s Constraint-Aware Feasibility Validation Use Case aligns pricing with real operational realities in air freight. By evaluating routing, capacity, IAC compliance, airport rules, and commodity restrictions before a quote is issued, the platform ensures each commitment is executable...not just commercially attractive. This integrated approach eliminates downstream service corrections and non-compliant shipments, helping freight forwarders maintain trust and deliver reliably through validated, feasible quoting.

Air freight's real problem isn't execution—it's commitment. Quotes go out before capacity, trucking, handling, and compliance are actually confirmed, so margin leaks and exceptions pile up before a shipment even moves. Aircon's answer isn't another marketplace or rate screen, but a decision layer that unifies pricing, eligibility, routing, and operational constraints into one governed call before the quote is sent—so forwarders can make promises they can keep.

Aircon solves a common problem in freight forwarding where commercial rules live in spreadsheets and policy docs rather than inside the quoting workflow. As an embedded control layer, it enforces margin floors, carrier exclusions, and customer agreements automatically at the moment a quote is generated, flags breaches before they reach the customer, and logs all overrides with a full audit trail.

Aircon's Pre-Exposure Quote Validation acts as a real-time commercial control layer embedded directly in the freight forwarder's existing quoting workflow, evaluating pricing, service feasibility, routing constraints, and margin simultaneously...before any quote leaves the desk. Rather than discovering costly errors post-booking, teams receive a fully validated decision with transparent logic at the moment it matters most, ensuring every quote issued is commercially sound and operationally executable.

SkyNet's manual quoting process couldn't scale with growing demand, so they embedded Aircon's AI decision layer alongside their existing workflow. The result: agent-generated quotes reached 58% of volume, manual hours dropped from 50 to 21 per month, win rates improved 12%, and they hit a record $204K in quoted revenue in a single month.

When sound logic is no longer enough, how can freight forwarders navigate turbulence within the air freight market?

The freight industry’s obsession with speed—believing the first quote wins—can backfire. A forwarder lost a $50K account despite responding in 47 minutes, while a competitor who took 3 hours won by offering tailored options and solving business problems. Speed matters, but insight matters more. Top forwarders ask smarter questions before quoting, uncovering real deadlines, risks, and strategic needs. They respond fast and thoughtfully—leading to higher win rates and better margins. The key isn’t speed-to-quote, but speed-to-insight.

Air freight has always favored the giants, but network effects are changing the game. With Aircon’s AI agents capturing expertise and sharing intelligence across a connected platform, forwarders can quote in 90 seconds, access better rates, and resolve issues before they happen—boosting win rates by 40% and doubling revenue in just 90 days.

Aircon, the freight tech company founded by logistics veterans, has raised $8M in funding to accelerate its mission of empowering independent freight forwarders. Its flagship product, Aircon, uses AI-powered agents to automate quoting, booking, and exception management. Enabling forwarders to double revenue in just 90 days.