Everest Transportation Systems builds AI-native brokerage with Pallet, achieving 10% net margin improvement

Summary

Everest Transportation Systems (ETS Simple) partnered with Pallet to build the first AI-native freight brokerage, automating the back office from quote to cash with 20 separate agents. With Pallet, the company has built a brokerage platform designed to scale, while maintaining the high-touch service customers expect. The efficiency gains are fueling profitable growth, with Everest hiring more team members to capture the new business that’s flowing in.

About the company

Everest Transportation Systems is a high-growth freight brokerage founded in 2015 and headquartered in Chicago, with operations in both the United States and Poland. The company specializes in full truckload, intermodal, drayage, expedited freight, and other surface transportation services across North America.

David Radom, Group CEO, leads Everest's growth strategy with a focus on scaling commercial operations and applying digital transformation to logistics. Eric Littel, CTO, oversees the company's technology strategy and operational systems.

Challenges

Everest's three-year plan required significant volume growth. In freight brokerage, that typically meant adding headcount at the same pace. What made that formula unsustainable was the operational complexity sitting underneath it.

Everest managed more than 20,000 distinct customer rules across 400 accounts, each with its own service level agreements, escalation paths, and process requirements. Meeting those contractual commitments consistently required significant operator attention, and exceptions in logistics were common.

The challenge compounded during a period of acquisitions and organizational changes. New SOPs layered into the business faster than they could be captured and distributed across the team. Operational knowledge lived with individual operators, effective until someone left, a customer changed their requirements, or a new team came on through a merger.

Sustaining the growth plan on the existing model required expanding headcount in proportion to shipment volume. Everest needed a different approach.

We needed to figure out a way to decouple operational costs with revenue growth.

David RadomCEO

Solution

The answer was clear: automate the entire back office. The question was whether to build that capability in-house or find a partner. Eric had seen both approaches play out in previous roles. Building in-house meant staff Everest didn't have and accepting a timeline that didn't work, with a result that would still need to learn freight from scratch. Pallet was already operational, already understood the domain, and could deploy immediately. Everest chose to partner with Pallet.

What made Everest unique was the scope of its ambition. Most brokerages were deploying AI against a single workflow. Everest wanted to automate the entire back office from day one: 20 agents spanning quoting, customer support, track and trace, invoicing, and more. Pallet was the only vendor that could support that scope.

There's so much opportunity that if we started off slow, we would be behind the curve.

Eric LittelCTO

Getting the implementation right was equally important. Eric had seen the conventional approach fail before: business analysts interview stakeholders, relay requirements to engineers, and months later the team sees something that bears little resemblance to what operators actually needed. Instead, Pallet put engineers directly alongside operators, observing workflows in practice rather than hearing about them secondhand.

Pallet’s team was on-site in Everest’s Poland office within days of signing. Pallet connected directly to Everest's email inbox to infer customer-specific rules and requirements from existing communication patterns, converting years of embedded institutional knowledge into structured agent logic. Multiple agents coordinated on a single shipment across the full lifecycle, quoting to covering to tracking to invoicing, with each stage informed by the customer context captured during onboarding.

Impact

Within months of deployment, Everest was running a different business. With routine back-office work automated, brokers shifted their time to revenue-generating work. Net margin improved 10%.

New hires who previously took 13 weeks to reach full productivity were operational in 4, a 69% reduction in ramp-up time.

Pallet gives all our reps a personal assistant so they can focus on revenue-generating activities.

David RadomCEO

Total headcount is actually increasing at Everest. With agents absorbing the back-office workload, Everest began adding sales and account management roles who could work even more efficiently. The commercial team focused on cross-selling, modal expansion, and customer relationships rather than managing operational exceptions.