Managing carrier disputes and inquiries is an ongoing task that consumes valuable time from transportation teams. You have to respond to carriers emailing a statement of accounts requesting updates on outstanding invoices. Your team must manually cross-reference each one against your TMS or AP platform, draft a reply, and email it back.
In many cases, that's just the beginning. The carrier follows up with another email and question. Invoices remain unresolved. The dispute stays open longer than it should. It creates friction with carriers, and puts strain on critical relationships that matter to you.
Loop built the Exception Agent to solve this issue.
The Loop Exception Agent is an AI-powered workflow that manages invoice disputes as well as vendor inquiries and communicates directly with your vendor through email to ultimately resolve the dispute or question. There is no new portal, no process change, and no manual work from your team.
Unlike standard automation tools that require rigid, predefined workflows, the Exception Agent understands context and operates where your carriers already work: their email inbox. It handles partial resolutions, knows when something is genuinely unresolvable and flags it for a human, and ultimately reduces the time from dispute to resolution while eliminating tedious tasks that distract your teams.
For example, if a vendor sends a statement of accounts, the agent reads the request, matches every invoice against data in Loop's system, assigns a status to each one, and returns a detailed reply with an annotated spreadsheet attached.
The agent manages the full conversation, not just the opening response. It reads replies, answers questions, processes attached documents, and continues the thread until every invoice is resolved or escalated.
While it handles the bulk of that work autonomously, there is always a human in the loop. The agent is designed to recognize when human judgment is needed, sensing frustration in a vendor's reply, flagging invoices it can't confidently resolve, or identifying situations that require a closer look, and escalates to a human at exactly those moments. The result is a system that offloads the routine work from your transportation and AP teams while keeping the right guardrails in place so it never does more than it should.
The Exception Agent handles three of the most common interactions, each reflecting a different way disputes and questions surface in practice.
A vendor sends an email with a spreadsheet of outstanding invoices and asks for a status update. The agent reads the request, parses every invoice, matches each one against Loop's system, and replies with an annotated report within minutes. No one on your team needs to touch it.
Every invoice is assigned one of three statuses:
A carrier writes in asking about a specific invoice. The agent reads the message, looks up the relevant details, and responds with the full context: invoice number, amount, exception type, current status, and what is needed to resolve it. The conversation continues until the question is closed.
This is where the full power of end-to-end automation comes through. When Loop's advanced audit system detects exceptions across a batch of invoices, whether a billing discrepancy, missing documentation, or another issue, the agent proactively reaches out to the carrier before they ever have to follow up.
The agent sends a detailed email with an annotated report explaining the issue on each invoice and what is needed to resolve it. The carrier reviews, sends back corrections or missing documentation, and the agent processes the response and continues the thread through to resolution. Internally, the status of any invoice is visible at any time, but the goal is that no one ever needs to get involved. The work gets done without anyone having to manage it.
Portals seem like the obvious answer. They give carriers a place to log in, check status, upload documents, and close disputes themselves. For carriers who prefer a self-serve experience, Loop Connect is a portal built for that. They can log in, check invoice status, and manage disputes without any back and forth. Loop Connect has recently been updated with new capabilities to make it even more powerful for carriers who use it.
Carriers that work with dozens of shippers often prefer not to learn and use a new portal for each one. Those carriers often send emails regardless of what tools are made available.
The Exception Agent is built for that reality. There is nothing to install, no credentials to set up, no training required. Carriers email Loop the same way they always have. The difference is the turnaround: a complete, accurate reply returned in minutes—24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Loop Connect and the Exception Agent are two paths to the same outcome. Some carriers will self-serve through the portal. Others will keep communicating over email. Either way, disputes get resolved, your team stays out of the back and forth, and the work happens automatically.
AP teams operate differently when it comes to disputed invoices. Some short-pay while the dispute is open, holding payment until the issue is resolved. Others pay on receipt and plan to recover the difference afterward through a credit.
The Exception Agent is built for teams that short-pay. It manages the dispute process before payment is released, tracking outstanding invoices and keeping the conversation with the carrier moving until the issue is resolved. For teams that pay first and recover later, a credit-chasing workflow is planned for the future. Either way, your existing AP process doesn't need to change for the disputes the agent handles today.
The immediate benefit is time. Hours of manual reconciliation, email drafting, and follow-up get handed off to a system that handles them faster and more consistently than a human could.
The deeper benefit is consistency and completeness. Disputes don't age out because someone was busy. Carriers don't have to send three follow-up emails before they get an answer. The relationship between shipper and carrier gets smoother, because those relationships directly affect service, capacity, and cost.
For AP teams specifically, the Exception Agent means the work that was always urgent but never strategic (the inbox management, the spreadsheet cross-referencing, the carrier back and forth) finally gets taken off the plate. What's left is the work that actually requires judgment.
The Exception Agent is one part of Loop's Logistics Data Platform. It works with your existing email setup and doesn't require carriers to change how they communicate with you.
If you're handling carrier inquiries, initiating disputes, or fielding SOA requests manually today, you may be eligible to use the Loop Exception Agent. Contact your account team to discuss options and how you can get started. The agent is generally available today for communications in English.
Or if you’re interested in more information, reach out to the Loop team to see a live demo.
