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CH Robinson Perform 3M+ Shipping Tasks with AI

[ April 22, 2025   //   ]

C.H. Robinson has performed more than 3 million shipping tasks with its fleet of generative artificial intelligence agents, proprietary tech tools the global logistics provider has built to automate steps across the lifecycle of a shipment and reduce customers’ speed-to-market from hours to seconds.

“That’s 3 million manual tasks our people didn’t have to do,” said Arun Rajan, chief strategy and innovation officer of Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based C.H. Robinson, one of the largest logistics service providers.

C.H. Robinson has been using artificial intelligence at scale for more than a decade and continuing today through its supply chain insights, optimization and visibility. With the newest and most powerful form of AI, the company broke a long-standing barrier to automation in 2023 and announced its first generative AI agents throughout 2024.

So far in 2025, data from C.H. Robinson’s 37 million shipments a year and from its supply chain experts have enabled the company to create new AI models, build new AI agents and rapidly increase the impact of its existing AI agents.

“We’re at well over 1 million price quotes delivered by AI. In March, we hit 1 million orders processed by AI,” Rajan said. “Those are two of our most mature generative AI agents, and they’re more capable every day as the models we’ve built get smarter and as we apply them to more of our 83,000 customers. Each additional shipping step we’ve automated beyond those has created new leaps in efficiency for global supply chains and freed our people to do more high-value work for our customers.”

Now the company is using its exclusive generative AI tech to provide price quotes, process orders, acquire trucking capacity, set appointments for pickup and delivery, check on loads in transit and has taken the first steps to supply tracking updates with generative AI.

“Price quotes for truckload shipments was a natural starting place for our generative AI tech, because we move more truckload freight than anyone in North America,” said Mark Albrecht, VP for Artificial Intelligence. “But we also do more less-than-truckload shipping than any 3PL. Since we added LTL to our quoting agent, every month we’ve had at least a 30 percent jump in LTL quotes delivered by AI. Our tech that classifies incoming email can even recognize when a shipper is asking for quotes on both truckload and LTL freight.”

LTL has also been a factor in growing the number of emailed load tenders that no longer have to be manually processed and the number of customers who are benefiting. AI handled as many LTL orders as truckload orders in February-March.

Now, C.H. Robinson is extending its AI agents to SMEs that heavily use email and LTL, cutting wait time to get in the email queue from four hours to less than 90 seconds.

As emails come into C.H. Robinson from carriers offering capacity, a new AI agent launched in January reads them, extracts information about available trucks and feeds the details into the company’s real-time capacity center.  In February, the agent uploaded nearly 10 times more trucks to the system.

In March, C.H. Robinson rolled out a new version of its AI agent for appointments, added voice capability to a pilot using generative AI to contact carriers for missing status updates, and built an AI model for responding to customer requests for tracking updates.

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