Clarification: This story's headline was updated to clarify the technology's scope.
C.H. Robinson Worldwide is incrementally turning tasks over to artificial intelligence technology, as the freight brokerage giant seeks to bolster productivity.
In the past few months, the company has announced various efforts to automate logistics management processes, such as responding to emailed quote requests from shippers and touchless appointments. These moves aim to free up time for its shrinking workforce to focus on customer retention and relationship building as well as revenue growth.
C.H. Robinson’s strategy appears to be paying off, according to executives on the broker's earnings call last week. President and CEO Dave Bozeman — who was hired in 2023 to improve efficiency — said he was encouraged by the company's productivity improvements. Later on the call, COO Arjun Rajan credited the company's use of generative AI in daily tasks as the source of the new efficiencies.
Rajan said concurrent work streams helped eliminate productivity bottlenecks in Q1, improving customer and carrier experiences.
"One of those work streams is aimed at using generative AI to automatically respond to transactional truckload quote emails to drive faster speed to market, increase our addressable demand, and reduce manual touches," he said.
How GenAI is being used for email quotes
C.H. Robinson sees emailed requests for quotes as an important use case for generative AI. Automating the process can eliminate human involvement in mundane tasks, letting staff focus on higher-return actions such as upselling and troubleshooting.
"Responding to transactional truckload quote requests is time-consuming for account teams and we must respond quickly to be competitive," Rajan said. "Through our automated process and utilizing our GenAI technology, more than 2,000 truckload customers are getting the benefit of faster response time with our automated email quotes, and we will continue to scale this technology to cover more customers and other modes."
The company started by developing proprietary technology that uses artificial intelligence to classify and read incoming emails. AI then determines if the inquiry was seeking a quote, and if so, will reply with pricing.
The company said its automated process can provide a quote in just over 2 minutes. The system replies to 2,000 customer quotes daily, C.H. Robinson said, noting the achievement opens doors to automating other transactions shippers and carriers choose to do by email.
While the company has other technology and applications that can provide instant price quotes, the AI-enabled solution is a breakthrough for customers who prefer email, Mark Albrecht, VP for artificial intelligence, said in the announcement.
“Email works the same for everybody,” he said. “There are no fields to fill in.”
Touchless appointments leverage a similar solution
Months before C.H. Robinson rolled out automated email quotes, the company released another productivity-boosting solution: touchless appointments.
“It’s far more efficient for technology to find an appointment slot that’s open, that works for both the loading dock and the carrier and gets the freight where it needs to be on time,” Michael Castagnetto, president of North America surface transportation, said in the announcement.
The two solutions have several similarities. First, C.H. Robinson is marketing them for their ability to free up staff's time for other, more productive tasks. But second, they both rely on AI to solve one of logistics' lingering technical challenges — reading and responding to emails.
Noah Hoffman, vice president of North America surface transportation, explained the importance of the technological breakthrough in a March interview.
Hoffman said when he began working at C.H. Robinson about 20 years ago, his desk had two telephones — one for taking shipments and the other for contacting receiving points. While a lot has changed since then, the appointment-scheduling process is often still labor-intensive, requiring clerks to seek out load details like cargo pick-up times, ready dates or labor availability, then match them with an ideal appointment time on various technological systems.
AI has enabled C.H. Robinson to automate several steps of that process, such as instantly matching appointment availability to book an ideal time, Hoffman said. Just as importantly, the technology helps even when shippers prefer to exchange details via email — as AI is able to process emails for key information, and automate C.H. Robinson's side of the process.
The result, Hoffman said, has been higher service for the customers using the technology which, as of March, were predominantly in the food and beverage space.
“Leveraging our scale with our data and then empowering an automated process, which leverages artificial intelligence to find optimal appointments, drives a higher-level service from both on-time pick up and on-time delivery,” Hoffman said.
Service, productivity, and leveraging scale for competitive advantage were also themes executives on C.H. Robinson's earnings calls highlighted when discussing technology.
Technology will be key to achieving the company's goals of boosting North America Surface Transportation shipments by 15% per person per day and growing Global Forwarding shipments by 10% per person per month, C.H. Robinson's COO said on the earnings call.
"GenAI puts the power of large language models into the hands of our frontline teams," Rajan said. "With more data and history to leverage than any other 3PL, we have opportunities to harness the power that Generative AI now offers to further capitalize on our information advantage and we'll continue to look for and pursue those opportunities."
