Email remains the lifeblood of customer operations teams—yet most inboxes are still routed by brittle rules that can read either the subject line or an attachment, but not both. The result is costly “swivel-chair” triage: someone opens each message, skims the body, downloads PDFs or images, then forwards or tags the conversation by hand. At scale—hundreds or thousands of messages per day—this delay frustrates customers, drains your support staff, and hides opportunities in plain sight.

Modern transportation, logistics, and distribution firms feel this pain acutely. Bills of lading, customs forms, photos of damaged freight, and urgent pickup requests may all arrive in a single email thread—and unless your routing engine can interpret the combined signal in the body and every attachment (including embedded screenshots), the message still lands in a generic queue. Operations slow to a crawl.

Why Automation Is the Only Sustainable Fix

• Volume never sleeps. As customer self-service portals and EDI feeds grow, so does the long-tail of “unstructured” email that still demands a human touch.

• Manual routing amplifies error. Copy-pasting reference numbers or picking the wrong queue is a single-click mistake that can ripple downstream—missed SLAs, duplicate tickets, and re-work.

• Context is scattered. Body, attachment text, and embedded images each hold unique clues. Seeing just one of them is like reading every other page of a novel.

• Staff want to solve problems—not sort mail. Eliminating low-value triage frees agents to focus on exceptions and high-stakes customer conversations.

Why UpBrains AI Is Uniquely Positioned

UpBrains AI pairs an agentic platform—where you compose reusable AI “skills” without code—with state-of-the-art language and vision models. Together they:

• Fuse multiple content streams. OCR the attachment, parse the email body, even transcribe text in images, then reason over all of it in one shot.

• Act rather than advise. Agents can tag a Front conversation, trigger a workflow, or call any Front API endpoint directly—no glue code required.

• Remain explainable and auditable. Each decision (classification, extraction, or routing) is logged with the exact rationale and confidence score, so operations teams can fine-tune when business rules evolve.

A Rapid Walk-Through: From Zero to Intelligent Routing

Below is a high-level recipe; each link opens the relevant step-by-step guide in UpBrains documentation.

1. Create your first AI agent
   Spin up a new agent in minutes using the visual builder. Define your trigger, actions, and learn how to test and publish your agent.
   → Creating your first AI agent

2. Connect the agent to Front
   Authorize UpBrains via OAuth or API Token to access your Front account. Add a rule in the right order to receive every new Front message (body + attachments information) as input to its trigger.
   → Connecting Front

3. Combine body and attachment content
   In the workflow canvas, us available actions to “OCR All Attachment(s)” of the email. Pipe email and the OCR outputs into a “Concatenate” action so the next step sees one unified text blob.
   → Common tools and actions

4. Classify & route
   Add a “Classify” action powered by UpBrains’ zero-shot model. Output the predicted class/queue or tag, then call “Front → Add Tag" and/or "Move to Inbox” actions.

5. (Optional) Extract structured fields
   Need reference numbers, dates, or totals? Plug in a custom extractor to pull specific entities from the merged text—body, PDF, spreadsheets, or JPEG alike with a high accuracy right out of the box.
   → Creating a custom extractor

6. Tap deep integrations—no code required
   Extend the logic with 40 + pre-built connectors: write extracted data to cloud storage or a shared drive, update CRM records, post a Microsoft Teams message, log an event in your ERP, create a Google Sheet row—anything, all from the same agent canvas.

7. Flexible triggering & orchestration

   • Agents can fire automatically when a new email arrives or be invoked synchronously by an external system.

   • An agent can pause, wait for downstream APIs to finish, then resume—ideal for long-running document checks or approvals.

   • Mix and match modes by following the patterns in “Connecting to External Tools & Data.”
     → Connect to external APIs & data

Real-World Impact: 1,000s of Emails per Day, 95 % Less Manual Touch

A North American transportation provider juggled over 120 000 emails each month across eight regional support hubs. Messages ranged from simple pickup requests (“attach this BOL”) to complex damage claims with photos embedded inline.

What Changed?

• Unified context. The agent combined body information and instructions with data found only in the attached screenshots and PDFs, avoiding mis-classification.

• Embedded images? No problem. OCR pulled shipment IDs from screenshots pasted into the email itself—something legacy parsers ignored.

• Continuous learning. Operations staff retrained the classifier on edge-cases right inside the builder; no redeploy needed.

Within two weeks, the company slashed routing latency from hours to one minute and cut manual effort by 95 %—without writing a single line of code.

See It in Action—Request Your Custom Demo

Ready to transform your inbox into an organized, self-routing powerhouse? Book a custom demo of UpBrains AI + Front and watch your sample messages classify, extract, and route themselves—body, attachments, embedded images, and all. Our experts will plug into your workflows live and show exactly how the agent adapts to your tech stack and SLAs.