By creating technology that reads incoming email then replicates tasks a person would do, global logistics company C.H. Robinson has automated steps across the entire lifecycle of a freight shipment: from giving customers a price quote, to accepting a load, to setting appointments for pickup and delivery, to checking on the load in transit.

This new proprietary tech incorporates generative artificial intelligence to overcome the decades-old challenge of automating transactions that shippers still commonly choose to do by email. Shippers directly integrated with C.H. Robinson’s platform have for years been able to get automated service instantly. But the same request sent by email had to wait for a person. Now, more than 10,000 of those routine transactions per day have been automated. Shippers who use email can get the same speed-to-market and cost savings as other customers, and the C.H. Robinson teams that serve them can spend more time on more valuable work.

“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,” said 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.”

After starting with price quotes, C.H. Robinson has applied generative AI to increasingly complex tasks. That required infusing the technology with the company’s market knowledge, specialized expertise in nearly every kind of supply chain and the specifics of each customer’s unique needs.

“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,” said Mark Albrecht, the company’s Vice President for Artificial Intelligence. “Our tech can connect details in different parts of the email, discern what’s missing, go 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 palletized. We can do that like no one else, because we have the competitive advantage of the largest dataset in the industry and because our generative AI tools continually learn from our experts.”

Before C.H. Robinson’s newest technology, it took as much as four hours for an emailed load tender to be taken care of by a person. That’s been reduced to 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,” Albrecht said. “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.”

C.H. Robinson’s new automation tech is being used for

  • 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 also 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 generative 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,” Rajan said. “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.”