C.H. Robinson has developed proprietary technology that uses generative AI to handle tasks typically managed by people, fully automating the freight shipment process.
This new system interprets incoming emails and replicates human actions, enabling automation across the entire shipment lifecycle—from providing price quotes and accepting loads to scheduling pickups and deliveries, as well as tracking shipments in transit.
“We announced in May that we’d been using our new tech for emailed price requests. Within a few short months, we created new models to automate more shipping steps and have already implemented them at scale,” stated Arun Rajan, the company’s Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer.
“This a major efficiency breakthrough for the industry and for supply chains around the world. When you think about retailers that need hundreds of different products on their shelves or automakers that rely on just-in-time delivery for the 30,000 different parts in a car, saving hours and minutes on every shipment matters,” added Arun Rajan.
Historically, transactions sent by email required manual intervention, unlike those made through direct integration with C.H. Robinson’s platform, which were instantly processed. Now, over 10,000 daily email-based transactions are fully automated, offering shippers using email the same speed and cost advantages as other customers while allowing C.H. Robinson’s staff to focus on higher-value tasks.
“An emailed load tender might only say, ‘I have a load for Tuesday’ because the shipper knows we know what they ship on Tuesdays. Or it could contain thousands of words about 20 loads in a PDF attachment with handwritten notes on it,” explained Mark Albrecht, the company’s Vice President for Artificial Intelligence.
Initially applied to price quotes, C.H. Robinson’s AI-powered technology now manages more complex tasks, thanks to its integration with the company’s industry knowledge and specialized expertise across various supply chains. Previously, processing an emailed load tender could take up to four hours; with AI, it’s reduced to just 90 seconds.
“Once a person got to the email in their inbox, it still took an average of seven minutes to manually enter all the shipment details into our system – and that’s for a single load. If the email tendered us 20 loads, a person would be stuck manually entering the information one load at a time. With generative AI, we can process all 20 loads simultaneously in the same 90 seconds. That’s an enormous time savings, especially when you consider we’ve scaled this to thousands of shipment orders per day just since June,” added Albrecht.
The new automation system handles:
- Price Quotes: Generating 2,600 quotes daily, now processed in 32 seconds, with expansion from truckload to less-than-truckload (LTL) quotes.
- Load Tenders: Converting 5,500 email-based load tenders into shipment orders daily within 90 seconds.
- Appointments: Automating pick-up and delivery scheduling from email requests, achieving 3,000 daily appointments across over 26,000 locations in just 60 seconds.
- In-Transit Visibility: When automated carrier updates fail, generative AI communicates directly with carriers, reducing the need for manual messaging by staff.
