What 2M dispatch emails taught our draft model about brevity
Freight email averages 41 words. Here’s why our AI drafts stay under 50.
Before we shipped AI drafts, we measured what dispatchers actually send. Across roughly two million outbound messages, the median reply ran 41 words. The broker on the other end writes about the same. Freight email is short because the people writing it are doing three other things at once.
That number shaped the whole feature. A draft that comes back at 140 words is not helpful even if every word is correct. The dispatcher has to read it, cut it, and second-guess the tone, which is slower than typing the two lines they had in mind. So we tuned the model to match the room it is writing into.
Length is a feature, not an afterthought
We cap suggested replies near the length of the thread they answer. A one-line question gets a one-line draft. A rate negotiation gets a few sentences. The model reads the last few messages for register and mirrors it, so a terse broker gets a terse reply and a wordy one gets a little more.
The best draft is the one a dispatcher sends without editing. Everything else is homework.
Sam Okoro, Applied AI
What we cut on purpose
- Greetings and sign-offs, unless the thread has them. Nobody opens a reply about detention with "I hope this email finds you well."
- Restating the question. The broker knows what they asked.
- Hedging. "I believe" and "it may be possible that" get stripped in favor of a straight answer or a clear "checking now."
The result is a draft you can send or ignore in about two seconds. When it is right, it saves the typing. When it is wrong, it is short enough that you have not lost anything reading it. That trade is the entire design.