Paint by Numbers or Blank Canvas: You Now Get Both
About 90% of what any freight forwarder, 3PL, or shipper needs to integrate is the same as what everyone else in the industry needs. Agent bookings. Carrier milestone updates. Invoice delivery. ASN automation. Solved problems, established patterns, known best practices.
The other 10% is where your operation is actually different — and where your real competitive advantage lives.
Most integration platforms are built for one or the other. We just made Chain.io the platform for both.
Introducing the New Flow Builder Experience
When you create a new flow in Chain.io, you'll now see two distinct paths laid out in front of you:
Structured Flows — the same best-practice-based approach that Chain.io has always offered. Structured Flows are organized around well-defined business processes: integrating with agents, connecting to visibility providers, sending invoices, syncing order data. If you're doing something that has a right way to do it, Structured Flows give you that right way — pre-configured, task-managed, and built on patterns that have been validated across hundreds of logistics operations.
Visual Builder — a free-form canvas for building exactly what you need, exactly how you need it. Drag, connect, configure. And now, if you'd rather just describe what you're trying to accomplish, our AI Flow Builder will generate the workflow from a simple prompt.
Two starting points. Same platform underneath.
Why Both?
Structured Flows get you through the 90% fast. Use our templates — built on patterns validated across hundreds of logistics operations — and go live in days instead of months. Agent bookings, visibility connections, invoice delivery, ASN automation: there's no reason to reinvent the wheel on work the industry has already figured out.
Visual Builder is for the 10% that's actually yours. The data flow that reflects how your operation specifically runs. The custom logic built from years of hard-won process knowledge. The integration that ties your internal systems together in a way nobody else does. That 10% isn't an edge case — it's where your competitive advantage lives, and you can't serve it with a template.
Structured Flows are paint by numbers. The picture is defined. Your job is to fill it in correctly.
Visual Builder is a blank canvas. The picture is yours — and now, AI can help you sketch it.
Either way, what's underneath doesn't change.
Same Pipeline. Same Power.
Whether you start from a Structured Flow or build something from scratch in Visual Builder, you're working inside the same Chain.io infrastructure:
- The same 290+ logistics plugins
- The same canonical data model that makes adapters reusable across every customer
- The same execution monitoring and logging
- The same Data Tags and search
- The same custom code and JSONata mapping tools
- The same 99.9994% execution reliability
Visual Builder isn't a lite version of Chain.io. It's the full platform with a different front door.
This matters because the alternative — maintaining two separate systems, one for structured integrations and one for custom builds — means two sets of credentials, two monitoring dashboards, two data pipelines, and twice the surface area for things to go wrong. We've seen what that costs logistics teams in time and operational overhead.
One platform means your team gets to the solution faster, regardless of which path they took to get there.
AI That Builds With You
The other thing we shipped alongside this change: Visual Builder now includes AI-powered flow generation.
Describe what you need in plain language. Chain.io will build the workflow for you.
This isn't about replacing the people who build integrations. It's about compressing the time between "I know what I need" and "it's running." The best integration builders on your team aren't slowed down by technical complexity — they're slowed down by the gap between a business requirement and a configured flow. AI Flow Builder closes that gap.
This is what AI in supply chain should look like: not a product you have to learn from scratch, but a tool inside the platform your team already uses, accelerating the work they're already doing.
The Bigger Picture
Brian Glick, our CEO, likes to say that Chain.io puts the gasoline in the AI engine. Clean, normalized, reliable logistics data is what makes AI useful in supply chain. You can't run AI on messy, disconnected data — and most logistics operations are sitting on exactly that.
Everything we've built in the platform — the canonical data model, the adapter library, the reliability infrastructure — exists to produce clean, connected data as a byproduct of integration. AI Flow Builder is the newest layer on top of that: the interface that lets you get to that clean data faster.
Paint by numbers when you need it. Blank canvas when you need that. All of it running through the same reliable pipeline.
That's the platform we built. We think it's the one the industry needs.
Ready to try Visual Builder? Log in to your Chain.io workspace and create a new integration to see the updated experience. Questions? Reach out to your customer success team or visit support.chain.io.
Chain.io connects systems used by supply chain teams, forwarders, agents, and carriers to simplify complex supply chains. With our integrations to leading supply chain technology providers, we make it easy to automate your logistics and gain valuable freight insights, all in one enterprise-grade platform. Learn more at www.chain.io.