United StatesChemicals and materials2024 – ongoingDow
AI agents that audit freight invoices
Dow built two Copilot agents to catch freight billing errors; the expected savings are still unaudited
Problem
Dow spends several billion dollars a year on outbound shipping, with invoices from up to 4,000 shipments a day. About a fifth of its shipping invoices, more than 100,000 a year, arrive as PDF attachments, which made it hard to check charges such as surcharges against contracted rates.
Approach
After a workshop with Microsoft in August 2024, Dow built an autonomous agent in Copilot Studio that reads invoice PDFs from email, structures the data and flags billing anomalies on a dashboard, plus a second 'Freight Agent' that lets staff question the flagged data in natural language. The proof of concept covered North American land shipments, using eight months of 2024 charges for 43,000 shipments, with a wider rollout across shipping modes planned.
Results
Takeaway
The agent's first job was to turn unstructured PDF invoices into checkable data; the anomaly detection depended on that step. Microsoft presented savings as expected in 2024 and realised in 2026, without independent verification.
Categories
- Size
- Large enterprise
- Industry
- Chemicals and materials
- Business function
- Logistics and supply chainFinance, risk and legal
- Innovation type
- Process innovation
- AI technology
- AI agentsGenerative AI
- Adoption
- Co-developed with a partner
- Evidence
- Vendor's case study
Sources
Source summaries
Microsoft described how Dow and Microsoft picked freight invoice checking in an August 2024 workshop and built two agents. Dow handled up to 4,000 shipments a day and more than 100,000 PDF invoices a year, and the proof of concept covered 43,000 North American land shipments. Dow expected to save millions of dollars in the first year.
Microsoft described Dow's wider Copilot rollout, which started with a few hundred employees and reached about a fifth of the workforce. It described the autonomous invoice agent and the freight agent, and quoted Dow expecting Copilot to save millions of dollars on shipping in the first year. Dow did not quantify time savings or realised savings.
The payments news outlet reported Microsoft's claim that the agents saved Dow millions of dollars. It cited Microsoft's 2024 figures on shipping volume. The savings claim came from Microsoft and Dow and had not been independently audited.
Full details are in the original sources.
