AI in ArgoWMS, and the security work underneath it

What the assistant does

Most questions a partner has about their operation already have an answer somewhere in ArgoWMS. The hard part has been getting to it: the right screen, the right filter, the right export, then a spreadsheet. The assistant shortens that path. You ask in plain language, and it works through your ArgoWMS data to answer.

Questions like these:

• How many units of my best seller are on hand right now?
• Which of yesterday's orders haven't shipped yet?
• What did we ship to Texas last month, and on which services?
• Which SKUs are running low ahead of next week's promotion?

It sits inside the newly redesigned ArgoWMS, which we wrote about in ArgoWMS, redesigned around the people who use it. The goal is the same as the redesign's: less time hunting for information, more time acting on it.

AI is part of how Argo runs

The assistant is the newest and most visible piece, but it isn't where our use of AI started. AI already works inside our business processes:

• Exception prediction. Models watch every carrier scan and flag shipments trending toward trouble, so our team can alert you, reroute where the carrier allows, reship at your direction, or file a claim where the service offers one, before your customer writes the one-star review.
• Packaging and dim weight. Models watch how parcels are boxed and rated, flagging where a different box or service level would cut what a shipment costs.
• Document handling. AI services help us organize, classify, and extract information from job and order documents so the right details reach the right place.
• Meeting follow-through. Our internal systems turn meeting notes into insights and action items, so commitments made on a call become tasks with owners.
• How we build software. Our engineers use AI tools in their daily work, which is a large part of how a team our size ships systems as broad as ours.

We think of AI the way we think of any tool on the floor. It earns its place by making the operation measurably better for partners, and it gets held to the same standards as everything else we run.

Opening the tools to partners

Here is the part we're most excited about. Our partners increasingly run AI assistants of their own, for planning, reporting, and customer service. Those assistants are only as useful as the systems they can reach.

So we are exposing ArgoWMS tools that a partner's own AI assistant can use, built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard for connecting AI assistants to business systems. Connected that way, your team's assistant could check stock before you launch a promotion, pull last week's shipments into a report, or answer a customer service question about an order, working from your ArgoWMS data rather than a stale export.

Very few 3PLs can offer that, because very few own their warehouse software. We can, because we built ArgoWMS ourselves.

Security comes first

You trust us with more than inventory. ArgoWMS holds your orders, which means your customers' names and addresses, along with your sales patterns and what you pay to ship. Connecting AI to that information raises fair questions, and we would rather answer them up front.

These are the rules we're building the assistant and the partner tools to, and the standard we hold each new capability to before it reaches partners:

• Your assistant sees only your data. Access is scoped to your account, using the same separation that keeps one partner's records apart from another's everywhere else in our systems.
• Permissions carry through. The assistant can see and do only what the signed-in person is already allowed to see and do. AI doesn't create a side door around anyone's role.
• Read first, act with confirmation. Answering questions comes first. Anything that would change data, such as holding an order or updating a record, needs a person to confirm it.
• Credentials you control. Connections from a partner's own AI tools use credentials tied to that partner's account, and they can be revoked.
• Activity is recorded. What the assistant and connected tools access is logged, so there is a record of what was asked and what was returned.
• Standard protections throughout, including encryption in transit, role-based permissions, and multi-factor authentication for sensitive access, as our Privacy Policy describes.
• Providers under contract. AI providers that process information for us do so on our behalf, under contract, and are disclosed in our Privacy Policy.

None of this is a finish line. Security is a practice, and we'll keep strengthening these controls as the assistant and the partner tools grow. If your company has its own security review for vendors, bring it. We would rather answer your questions in detail than ask you to take our word for it.

Why this matters for the industry

Logistics runs on data that's scattered across carts, carriers, warehouses, and spreadsheets. AI is good at pulling scattered information together and putting it in front of the person who needs it. That's a genuine change in what a fulfillment partner can offer, and it will separate providers who own their systems from those who rent them.

It also raises the bar on trust. A 3PL that adopts AI without the access and privacy controls underneath is asking its partners to carry a risk they didn't sign up for. We would rather take a little longer and get it right.

Where this fits

Argo is a technology company that lives in logistics and print, and our mission is to change our partners' lives by owning everything after the order. AI is the natural next step in that mission: a partner who can ask a question and get a straight answer from their own data has one less thing to chase.

It's also the value we call Evolution. Standing still is losing ground, and in a year when AI is changing how businesses operate, that's truer than ever. We intend to keep building, carefully, and in the open.

The bottom line

ArgoWMS now has an AI assistant, and we're opening tools that let partners' own AI assistants work with their ArgoWMS data. Both are built on rules that keep your data scoped to you, respect every user's permissions, and put a person in the loop before anything changes. AI is part of how Argo runs. Protecting your data is part of how we run AI.