With Autopilot, you can automate routine shipment updates, reduce manual check-calls, and create proactive workflows that keep your team and customers informed. Below, we’ll walk through what Autopilot is, how it works, and why it matters for your ops team.
Why use Chaine Autopilot?
In brokerage, track and trace activities are a massive time suck, especially loads that are high touch, have early morning or weekend appointments, or warehouse-specific requirements. Autopilot helps eliminate this manual overhead by automatically triggering reminders, status checks, and updates based on real-time shipment events like pickup, arrival, and ETA.
Instead of waiting for problems, you get ahead of them.
Most tracking tools stop at visibility. You get a dot on the map, maybe a timestamp, and that’s it. If there’s no tracking, no ETA, or a missed appointment, someone on your team still has to notice it, decide what to do, and start calling carriers.
Autopilot changes that.
It doesn’t just monitor shipments, it automates the follow-up, based on your current operational workflows.
You set the rules:
→ “2 hours before pickup, if tracking is off, ask for ETA.”
→ “At delivery, request a POD.”
→ “Every day at 6 AM, run a check-call on in-transit loads.”
The system handles the timing, the logic, and the outreach, so your ops team doesn’t have to obtain every update manually.
Each rule is linked to a specific shipment milestone, and can include smart logic like:
“Only fire if tracking is off”
“Only fire if there's no ETA”
“Only fire if arrival hasn’t occurred by X time”
Built-in rule templates to get you started fast
No need to build from scratch. Autopilot includes a curated library of rule templates for common milestones: pickup, ETA, delivery, POD, and more. You can enable these in a few clicks, then edit or customize as needed.
Easily create rules for specific customers or lanes
Want to trigger a special update just for a sensitive shipper like Walmart?
Or automate status requests only for loads with no ELD?
Autopilot lets you create custom rules with filters for:
Shipper/customer
Equipment type
Tracking status
Appointment window
And more.
Scale without adding more headcount
Once your rules are set up, they run in the background, day or night, so your team can focus on solving actual problems, not repeating the same manual tasks over and over.
Autopilot is especially powerful for:
Weekend, overnight and early morning freight
Reefer and high-maintenance loads
Loads with inconsistent tracking
Brokers managing more volume with fewer ops staff
POD collection
Relaying warehouse-specific instructions to carriers
In times, out times, ETA collection, and more.
💡 Tip
Want to see what types of rules you can create?
Check out our Getting Started with Autopilot Rules guide.