Our stories.

Aircon founder and CEO Chris Condon joined the Dona Kapp Show to discuss the leadership lessons behind building Aircon, including the difference between ownership as a legal status and stewardship as a daily commitment to employees, customers, and family, plus his view that AI should enhance human judgment in freight rather than replace it. Worth a listen for anyone building something meant to last.

Trade lanes are shifting faster than contracts, and forwarders can’t compete on rates alone anymore. The real advantage is quote commitments that are operationally validated...routes, capacity, surcharges, and margins checked before the customer ever sees the number. At Aircon, we help forwarders make faster, higher‑quality decisions so every quote is one they can commit to with confidence.

Multi-Carrier Decision Optimization Use Case, addresses the challenge forwarders face when working across multiple carriers—defaulting to familiar options rather than optimal ones because comprehensive evaluation takes time that operational speed doesn't allow, resulting in suboptimal routing, missed margin opportunities, and quotes built on incomplete analysis. Aircon solves this by aggregating rates from airlines, GSSAs, consolidators, and digital marketplaces, then evaluating them against the forwarder's commercial rules and feasibility constraints in a single pre-exposure decision. Carriers are ranked not just by price but by alignment with margin requirements, service feasibility, and prioritization logic, giving operators the intelligence to make the right decision rather than just a fast one. This approach delivers a 60% reduction in carrier evaluation time, improved margin per shipment from optimized carrier selection, and eliminates carrier selections that fail downstream feasibility checks—proving that speed without evaluation is just faster exposure, while Aircon ensures carrier decisions are commercially validated before commitment.

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.

Customer-Specific Commercial Controls ensures that negotiated rates and customer-specific pricing agreements are automatically enforced at the moment of quoting, eliminating reliance on manual recall or institutional memory. When pricing conditions live in emails and spreadsheets rather than within the quoting workflow, teams face inconsistent outcomes—over-pricing damages trust while underpricing erodes margin. Aircon solves this by storing and enforcing customer-specific pricing rules, discount tiers, and agreed rate conditions as part of its commercial rule enforcement capability, automatically applying the correct pricing regardless of which operator initiates the quote. This approach delivers 100% customer pricing consistency, an 80% reduction in billing disputes, and eliminates the risk that commercial intent depends on who happens to remember the agreement.

Surcharge accuracy isn't a back-office problem — it's a decision timing problem. Fuel, security, AWB, and peak levies shift constantly across carriers and lanes, and when validation happens after the quote is built, margin leakage is invisible until it's too late. Aircon integrates live carrier surcharge feeds directly into the pre-exposure decision process, applying current surcharges automatically and surfacing an itemized margin breakdown before the quote is issued. The result: zero surcharge omissions, 3–8% recovery in previously missed surcharge revenue, and no more post-booking margin corrections.

In this Next Level Up podcast episode, Chris Condon, founder of Aircon, talks about how his startup is building a “decision layer” for air cargo that offers freight forwarders real-time intelligence at the point of quoting – margins, route feasibility, and carrier reliability. He uses his own career, from forklift driver to freight forwarding executive, as a backdrop to argue that the industry is too focused on cost and not enough on service and reliability, which are the real differentiators, and sees AI as a force multiplier that allows operators to focus on relationships and higher-value work.

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.

Aircon’s Feasibility Validation Use Case is a Constraint-Aware solution that matches pricing to real operational realities for air freight. The platform makes sure that every commitment is executable, not just commercially attractive, by analyzing routing, capacity, IAC compliance, airport rules and commodity restrictions before issuing a quote. This integrated approach eliminates downstream service corrections and non-compliant shipments allowing freight forwarders to keep their promise and deliver reliably through validated and feasible quoting.

The real problem with air freight is not execution it is commitment. Quotes go out before capacity, trucking, handling and compliance are really confirmed, so margin leaks and exceptions build up before a shipment even moves. Aircon’s answer is not another marketplace or rate screen. Instead it is a decision layer that combines pricing, eligibility, routing and operational constraints into one governed call before the quote is sent...so forwarders can make promises they can keep.

Aircon addresses a common challenge in freight forwarding of commercial rules residing in spreadsheets and policy docs instead of inside the quoting workflow. As an embedded control layer, it automatically enforces margin floors, carrier exclusions, and customer agreements at the point a quote is generated, flags breaches before they get to the customer, and logs all overrides with a full audit trail.

Aircon’s Pre-Exposure Quote Validation adds a real-time commercial control layer directly into the freight forwarder’s existing quoting workflow, assessing pricing, service feasibility, routing constraints and margin…before any quote leaves the desk. Teams are given a fully validated decision with clear logic at the time it matters most, meaning every quote issued is commercially viable and operationally deliverable, not finding expensive errors after booking.

SkyNet’s manual quoting process was unable to cope with the growing demand, so they placed Aircon’s AI decision layer alongside their existing workflow. The result? Agent-generated quotes made up 58% of the volume, manual hours dropped from 50 to 21 per month, win rates improved by 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.