Holocene, the company behind the email-based inbound transportation management system (TMS) EPOCH, today announced Agents in EPOCH, a new capability that lets supply chain teams build their own AI agents to carry out inbound supply chain work.
A user describes a task in a single sentence of plain language, and the agent begins running the same day, with no IT project and no product customization required.
The agents are built into EPOCH, which reads the emails manufacturers already receive from suppliers and forwarders and keeps a current record of every purchase-order line.
Agents act on that record: they chase suppliers, reconcile shipping documents, correct order lines and notify plants. Customers can start from a library of ready-made agents or build their own.
According to Holocene, the launch addresses work that supply chain software has left manual. Standard processes such as purchase orders and transport booking are widely automated.
Exceptions specific to one manufacturer, such as a single supplier's packing-list format, a country-specific duty rule or one plant's arrivals report, have rarely justified an IT project. The company said the launch is intended to give the power to automate back to the people who solve supply chain problems every day. Employees who handle those exceptions can now automate them directly, covering specific edge cases.
"Every supply chain on earth is unique, yet every supply chain tool on earth assumes it isn't, " said Navneet Lekshminarayanan, CEO and co-founder of Holocene. "Most AI talks about your supply chain. Our agents work in it. Now the person who understands the problem can automate the fix the same day, without waiting for an IT project."
Holocene's customers already use agents to reconcile purchase orders against daily supplier and logistics updates and to keep planning teams informed of expected material arrivals, among other use cases.
An AI agent is only as reliable as the data it acts on, Holocene said, and Agents in EPOCH work from each customer's own truth and context. According to the company, a generic AI assistant has never seen a company's shipments, and the system of record often still shows the delivery date promised when an order was placed. The current picture arrives by email, in supplier confirmations, forwarder updates, packing lists and delivery notes. EPOCH extracts that information as the emails arrive, updates every incoming material line and creates the tasks and actions that agents carry out. Each agent therefore starts with the company's full context—its shipments, its suppliers and its own internal rules—and acts on what suppliers and forwarders actually wrote, not on assumptions. Suppliers do not need to be onboarded or change how they work, and customers do not need to clean their data beforehand.
"We don't need clean data. We need real data," Lekshminarayanan said. "In manufacturing, the real data sits in the inbox. With Agents in EPOCH, it no longer just gets read. It gets acted on."
Agents operate under controls set by the customer. Each agent works within rules defined by the customer's team, every run is logged, and any agent can be paused at any time.
The launch follows the grant of a European patent for Holocene's email-based method and the June introduction of Meridian, the company's logistics network analyst.
Agents are available today to all EPOCH customers, starting with a library of ready-made agents. More information is available at holocene.eu.
Founded in 2022, Holocene GmbH builds EPOCH, the inbound TMS that runs on the emails manufacturers already receive from suppliers and forwarders, with no supplier onboarding. EPOCH rebuilds the real arrival date of every purchase-order line. Meridian, its integrated logistics network analyst, optimizes that inbound to free up capital stuck in transit, and Agents in EPOCH act on both.
The result is an inbound supply chain manufacturers can trust, with less working capital tied up in safety stock. Holocene's technology is protected by a granted European patent. The company is headquartered in Berlin, Germany, and serves manufacturing organizations worldwide. Learn more at holocene.eu.
