Field notes: an onboarding agent in a regulated industry

What a logistics team learned shipping an agent that legal had to sign off on line by line.

The brief

Halden Freight onboards new carriers every week. The process meant three weeks of email: documents, insurance certificates, bank details, compliance checks. The goal was an agent that could do the busywork while a human approved each carrier.

What legal needed

• A record of every document the agent read and every field it extracted.

• Proof that it never contacted a carrier without approval.

• The ability to replay any decision months later.

None of that is about the model. It is about the runtime around it.

How they built it

Narrow tools

The agent got six tools and nothing else: read a document, extract fields, check a registry, draft an email, request approval, update the CRM. Sending email sits behind the approval tool.

Policies as code

A spend cap per run, a step limit, and a hard rule that bank details are never written without a human approving them first.

“The traces are the reason legal signed off. They could see every step, not a summary of it.” Mira Okafor, Head of Platform

Results after a quarter

• Carrier onboarding went from about three weeks to one afternoon.

• Manual review time dropped 92%.

• Zero unapproved outbound messages.

What they would do differently

Start with replay from day one. They added it in week four and wished they had their first month of traces to rehearse against.