What does the eFTI Regulation change for transport documents?
A lorry cab still carries a stack of paper whose main purpose is a possible roadside check: consignment note, dangerous goods transport document, proof of cabotage or combined transport. For an AI agent in freight transport, that paper stays out of reach until it exists as data. The eFTI Regulation sets the framework that turns it into data, and gives it a date: 9 July 2027.
The eFTI Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2020/1056, requires authorities in every Member State to accept regulatory freight transport information that an operator makes available electronically from a certified platform. An AI agent can then read, match and check structured data where it previously had only documents to work with.
An obligation that falls on authorities first
Article 5 requires competent authorities to accept electronically provided information 30 months after the entry into force of the first delegated and implementing acts under Articles 7 and 8. Those acts were published in the Official Journal on 20 December 2024 and entered into force on 9 January 2025. From 9 July 2027, an inspector will have to accept eFTI data presented from a certified platform, in machine-readable form and, on request, on the screen of a device belonging to the operator.
Businesses keep the option of paper. Recital 8 of Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2243 says so plainly: operators retain the right to present regulatory information as paper documents. Article 16 of the 2020 Regulation, however, asks the Commission to assess by 21 February 2029 whether operators should be required to provide this information electronically. A shipper or carrier waiting for that assessment before getting organised is taking an avoidable risk, in our view, since customers and subcontractors may not wait.
Which documents the Regulation covers
Article 2 lists the regulatory information in scope, including transport documents required under Regulation No 11 of 1960 on transport rates and conditions, combined transport records, road cabotage evidence, waste shipment documents, and the information required for carrying dangerous goods by road, rail and inland waterway (ADR, RID, ADN). Each Member State also notifies national provisions, listed in Annex I, Part B, which Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/2025 updated. The French entries, for example, include the order of 9 November 1999 on the documents that must be carried on board road haulage vehicles. Before scoping any project, check your own country’s entries in that annex.
e-CMR and eFTI are separate matters
The international electronic consignment note falls under the Additional Protocol to the CMR Convention, signed in Geneva on 20 February 2008, which governs the document’s standing between shipper, carrier and consignee. eFTI deals with something else: how authorities access regulatory information. Implementing Regulation 2025/2243 states that it sets no requirements on the electronic format of commercial documents exchanged between businesses. A single journey can therefore produce an e-CMR for the contract and an eFTI dataset for enforcement, and an agent will need to read both.
Where does implementation stand on 7 October 2026?
Acts already published
Several implementing measures are already in force. Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/1942 sets out how authorities access the data and the role of the eFTI Gates through which their requests travel. Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/2024 establishes the eFTI common data set and its subsets, one per regulatory requirement. Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/2025 updates the list of national provisions. Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2243, published on 7 November 2025, details the functional requirements for eFTI platforms: access, processing rights, logs and security.
For anyone designing an agent, this 2025 Regulation goes into the detail. It organises data by “consignment movement”: carriage by a single self-propelled means of transport from one loading point to one unloading point under a single transport contract. Each movement gets a dataset with a unique identifier (UUID) that holds the elements common to several requirements only once. The same Regulation requires eFTI data to be stored in the Union or under the jurisdiction of the Union or a Member State.
What is still pending
The certification rules for eFTI platforms and service providers, which Articles 12 and 13 leave to delegated acts, had not appeared in the Official Journal as of 7 October 2026, as far as our searches show. The Commission’s page on the Regulation says it plans to adopt the remaining specifications by December 2026. Until those rules exist, the date when a platform can call itself certified remains open, and so does the moment a carrier can rely on it at a roadside check. We advise putting that question to your TMS and platform vendors now, in writing.
What can an AI agent do with digital freight data?
An AI agent is software built on a language model, such as Claude, that reads data and documents, applies written rules and acts within a defined scope, keeping a record of every action. On eFTI data, its ground is consistency: between the order, the transport document, the dangerous goods declaration and what the vehicle actually carries.
Preparing the dataset before departure
The agent starts from the transport order and data held in the TMS or ERP, identifies which regulatory requirements apply to the movement (dangerous goods, combined transport, cabotage, waste) and checks that every element required by the matching subset is filled in. It lists what is missing and who should supply it. Recital 7 of Regulation 2025/2243 encourages reuse of data already held in transport management systems, which makes the quality of TMS data the first workstream of any eFTI project.
Checking consistency across documents
A UN number that does not match the proper shipping name, a declared weight far from the order, an unloading address that differs between consignment note and dataset: Claude spots these gaps by comparing fields and documents in different formats. On dangerous goods, the agent flags the discrepancy and leaves the fix to a person who answers for the shipment. Our Document Intelligence agent demo shows this kind of extraction from mixed documents, with each data point traced back to its place in the source file.
Tracking requests from authorities
Article 7 of Regulation 2025/2243 lets businesses receive notifications about authorities’ data access requests and the follow-up communications attached to them. An agent can read those notifications, find the movement concerned, gather its history and draft a note for the operations manager. The reply to the authority then comes from an authorised person, working from that note and the movement’s log.
Matching transport and invoicing
The same data is useful after delivery. A movement’s dataset records what was carried, from where and to where, so the agent can match it against the carrier’s invoice and the contract rate. The logic is close to that of our AI agent that checks purchase invoices, applied here to freight services.
Which operations should an agent perform on an eFTI platform?
Processing rights split by operation
Article 9 of Regulation 2025/2243 lists the operations a business can perform on a dataset: create it, modify it, read it, download a copy, apply the consignor’s, carrier’s or consignee’s signature, receive the combined transport stamp and archive it. Article 5 requires each onboarded user’s rights to be recorded in an authorisation registry, operation by operation, with their validity period and the data elements they cover.
That granularity makes an agent easier to govern. We recommend giving the agent read and download rights, putting creation and modification behind approval, and leaving signatures to the people who commit their company. A consignor’s or carrier’s signature has legal effects between the parties, and delegating it to an agent would hand it a business decision.
A connected agent goes through onboarding
Regulation 2025/2243 provides for machine-to-machine access through “tributary ICT systems”, identified and authenticated under the legal responsibility of a user business and onboarded by the platform operator. In our reading, an agent that reads or writes on an eFTI platform through an API goes through this mechanism, or through a system that is already onboarded. The connector linking it to the platform should be audited like any privileged access, a process we cover in our article on auditing MCP connectors before production.
Two logs that must line up
The platform logs every operation for every data element: the user, date and time, type of operation and, where a value changes, its original value. The agent keeps its own log: model version, instruction version, documents consulted, proposal made, person who approved it. We recommend building a link between each line in the platform log and the decision behind it, so you can answer a dispute or an inspection. Building that link at design stage is cheap, whereas rebuilding it afterwards, once the agent’s instructions have changed, is rarely possible.
What other rules apply to an AI agent in logistics?
The AI Act and drivers
Point 2 of Annex III to the AI Act classifies as high-risk AI systems used as safety components in the management and operation of road traffic, a role a document agent does not play. Point 4 covers systems intended to allocate tasks based on individual behaviour, personality traits or characteristics, or to monitor and evaluate the performance and behaviour of persons in work relationships. An agent that assigns routes based on each employed driver’s driving behaviour falls under point 4. The AI digital omnibus, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, in force since 27 July 2026, set the application date for these obligations at 2 December 2027. Since 2 August 2026, Article 50 has also required an agent that interacts with a person, such as the contact at the consignee, to tell them they are dealing with an AI, unless this is obvious from the context. The full timeline is on our AI Act compliance page.
Personal data in eFTI datasets
Consignee name, delivery address, sometimes the driver’s identity: an eFTI dataset contains personal data. Article 9 of the 2020 Regulation requires platforms to allow processing in line with the GDPR, and Regulation 2025/2243 requires them to delete that data within a reasonable time after the retention period. Its EU storage requirement covers data held on the platform: the text governs how tributary systems access that data without setting a storage location for them. We recommend settling that point with your data protection officer, documenting where the agent processes the data and how long it keeps it.
Where should a logistics business start before July 2027?
Start by mapping your regulatory documents and the systems that hold their data, then run an agent in read-only mode on pre-departure consistency checks. Signatures and replies to authorities stay with authorised people, and every action the agent takes is logged.
- List, flow by flow, the regulatory information you produce: dangerous goods, combined transport, cabotage, waste, national on-board documents.
- Locate the data in the TMS, ERP, WMS or with subcontractors, and assess its quality.
- Compare it with the eFTI common data set in Delegated Regulation 2024/2024 and list the gaps.
- Ask your vendors in writing for their certification plan and timeline.
- Deploy the agent read-only on consistency checks, then open write rights one operation at a time.
- Align the agent’s log with the platform’s, and name an owner for each flow.
Classifying each operation with LOOP™
At Koneetiv, we govern these agents with LOOP™, the framework that sets what each agent may do on its own. The framework places every action in one of 4 trust zones. On freight data, reading a dataset and running consistency checks sit in the green zone. Creating or modifying a dataset moves to the orange zone, with human approval before execution. A UN number discrepancy or an unexpected authority request goes to the red zone, with mandatory escalation to a human decision. An attempt to sign on a company’s behalf, or to reach data elements outside the recorded rights, triggers the black zone: immediate block and an alert to the CISO. The LOOP™ living register records, for each agent, the data it accesses and its scope of action, which mirrors the authorisation registry the platform requires.
Koneetiv’s role
Koneetiv is a French consultancy and official Anthropic partner that works only with Claude, for companies and regulated industries. We design and run these agents through Claude Ops, connected to the operational tools already in place. Our page on Claude AI agents for transport and logistics covers the sector’s other use cases, and the operations function page covers day-to-day operational work. To check whether your organisation is ready to hand freight data to an agent, the AI maturity assessment places you in a few minutes, governance included.