Replacing six hours of manual data entry a day with an AI agent

The operations team was manually re-keying shipment data between a carrier portal, a spreadsheet, and their internal system every day, roughly six hours of work spread across two people, with regular transcription errors that caused billing disputes.

• ✓ An agent that pulls shipment data from the carrier portal on a schedule
• ✓ Validation logic that flags anomalies for human review instead of auto-committing them
• ✓ Direct write-back into their internal system via its existing API
• ✓ A daily summary report of what was processed and what needed attention
• ✓ Logging and an evaluation harness to track accuracy over time

The team did not need a general-purpose AI tool, they needed one very specific, repetitive workflow gone. We scoped the agent narrowly: pull, validate, and reconcile shipment records, with anything unusual routed to a human rather than guessed at.

We built the extraction layer against the carrier portal first and validated it against three weeks of historical data before writing a single line of the write-back logic, so we knew the inputs were trustworthy before automating the output.

A lightweight review queue in their existing tool handles the small percentage of shipments the agent is not confident about, which kept trust high with the operations team from week one instead of asking them to accept a black box.

Twelve days after kickoff the agent was running in production, and the two staff who had been doing the manual entry moved to reviewing exceptions and handling customer disputes, work that actually needed a person.