C.H. Robinson: Automating Freight Shipments with Gen AI

C.H. Robinson claims to “deliver logistics like no one else” – a bold statement, but one it’s poised to make good on thanks to its latest innovations in generative AI. 

By creating proprietary tech that reads incoming email, before replicating tasks that a human being would usually undertake, the organisation is successfully automating steps across the entire lifecycle of a freight shipment.

This stretches from giving customers a quote, all the way through to checking on loads during transit.

Automating routine transactions

C.H. Robinson’s technology incorporates Gen AI to overcome the decades-old challenge of automating transactions that shippers still commonly choose to do by email.

For years, shippers directly integrated with C.H. Robinson’s platform have been able to get automated service instantly, but requests sent via email had to wait for somebody to respond. 

Now, more than 10,000 of these routine transactions per day can be automated, meaning shippers using email get the same speed-to-market and cost savings as other customers.

It also means C.H. Robinson team members are able to spend more time on value-adding work.

“We announced in May that we’d been using our new tech for emailed price requests,” explains Arun Rajan, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at C.H. Robinson. “Within a few short months, we created new models to automate more shipping steps and have already implemented them at scale.

“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.”

Automating the freight lifecycle

C.H. Robinson initially began efforts to automate the freight shipment lifecycle by applying Gen AI to price quotes, but soon moved on to increasingly complex tasks. 

This meant infusing technology with the company’s immense market knowledge, specialised expertise in varied supply chains and the specifics of each customer’s unique needs. 

Mark Albrecht, VP for Artificial Intelligence at C.H. Robinson, sheds further light on the practical applications: “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.

“Our tech can connect details in different parts of the email, discern what’s missing, fill in the blanks and take action. We’ve even built it to determine things like which shipments are best for less-than-truckload and how different commodities should be palletised. 

“We can do that like no one else, because we have the competitive advantage of the largest dataset in the industry and because our Gen AI tools continually learn from our experts.”

Significant time savings

Before C.H. Robinson’s newest technology was introduced, it took as long as four hours for an emailed load tender to be taken care of by an employee.

Now, that timespan has been 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,” Mark continues. 

“If the email tendered us 20 loads, a person would be stuck manually entering the information one load at a time. With Gen AI, we can process all 20 loads simultaneously in the same 90 seconds. That’s an enormous time saving, especially when you consider we’ve scaled this to thousands of shipment orders per day since June.” 

C.H. Robinson creates tangible business value

C.H. Robinson’s new automation tech is already being used for the following purposes:

• Emailed price requests: This has grown to 2,600 quotes delivered a day and, at 32 seconds, is now even faster. Having started with truckload quotes, the tech has been expanded to handle LTL quotes. 
• Emailed load tenders: The tech is turning emails into 5,500 shipment orders a day, achieved in 90 seconds.
• Emailed appointments: When a customer uses email rather than C.H. Robinson’s touchless appointments, the tech extracts the details needed to lock in a pick-up or delivery time. So far, this is done 3,000 times a day across more than 26,000 locations within 60 seconds. 
• In-transit visibility: For instances when a carrier’s automated status updates aren’t working, C.H. Robinson is piloting the use of Gen AI to interact with the carrier, rather than taking up staff time to send an email, text or instant message.   

“While other companies may be using generative AI for simple data queries or chatbots, we’re harnessing that power to create tangible business value for our customers,” Arun adds 

“The faster we can accomplish every routine step in getting their freight on a truck, the greater their potential cost savings. The more we free our staff from mundane tasks, the more they can enhance and strengthen our customers’ supply chains. 

“In a world where a port strike, a hurricane and a Middle East war can be happening all at once, we’re focused on helping our customers be resilient in the face of these increasingly frequent and intense disruptions.” 

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