C.H. Robinson touts progress of its generative AI technology for automating lifecycle of a freight shipment

Earlier today, Minneapolis, Minn.-based global third-party logistics (3PL) services provider and freight forwarder C.H. Robinson (CHR) said it has made further inroads through its use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, leveraging AI to automate the lifecycle of a freight shipment.

Through its proprietary generative AI technology, the company said that the automated steps the technology addresses for an entire lifecycle of a freight shipment, upon receiving and reading an incoming e-mail, include: giving customers a price quote; accepting a load; setting appointments for pickup and delivery; and checking the load in transit.

By incorporating generative AI, CHR said that it can now automate more than 10,000 “routine” transactions per day, as opposed to the standard e-mail method used by shippers, with the company explaining that its shipper customers that are directly integrated with the company’s platform have had the ability to instantly get automated service, whereas an e-mail request needed to wait for a person to assist. And the key difference with this technology is that now that shippers who use e-mail are able to receive the same speed-to-market and cost savings as other customers, while CHR teams serving them can attend to more valuable tasks.

What’s more, as an example, it said that prior to this rollout, it could take up to four hours for an e-mailed load tender to be worked on by an employee, whereas now it takes 90 seconds.

“We announced in May that we’d been using our new tech for e-mailed 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.”

C.H. Robinson’s AI-based automation technology is being used in various ways, including:   

• E-mailed price requests, which have grown to 2,600 quotes delivered per day, with improved speed at 32 seconds and along with truckload quotes, it now has also been expanded to handle LTL quotes;
• E-mailed load tenders, which are turning emails into 5,500 shipment orders a day, achieved in 90 seconds;
• E-mailed appointments: When a customer uses email rather than C.H. Robinson’s touchless appointments, the company said this tech extracts the details needed to lock in a pick-up or delivery time, adding it is being done 3,000 times a day across more than 26,000 locations within 60 seconds; and
• In-transit visibility: In instances when a carrier’s automated status updates aren’t working, C.H. Robinson said it 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

Megan Orth, CHR’s Director of Digital Connectivity, provided LM with an overview of the company new AI offerings in a Q&A below.

LM: What drove the need for CHR to roll out this new proprietary AI technology?

Orth: Global supply chains aren’t getting any getting less complex, and our customers rely on us to solve their toughest challenges and mitigate increasingly frequent and intense disruptions. At the same time, our new operating model is helping us get more fast, fit and focused. In a culture of continuous improvement, we’re always looking for opportunities to lift repetitive, mundane tasks from our people so they can do more strategic work.”

Generative AI is an enabler of speed and efficiency, and it has allowed us to make breakthroughs in automating transactions that defied automation for decades.  Our tech can now reliably perform these tasks across the lifecycle of a shipment.

LM: How long had it been planned or in the works?

Orth: The first of these tools we started to scale in January, while the others were in development. Then we rolled those out in May and June. Each of them we’ve now scaled to performing the tasks thousands of times a day for thousands of customers.

LM: What are the main benefits of it for CHR's shipper customers? Can you please provide some examples?

Orth: Our ecosystem of generative AI tools enhances service, provides greater speed-to-market and enables more competitive pricing. It’s the difference between hours for a human to get through an inbox of e-mails vs. seconds for our smart automation to do it.  Virtually no waiting for the customer, and their reps have more time to spend doing more strategic work for them.

Speed-to-market has always been critical to our customers. The faster we get a customer a price quote, the faster they can tender us a load, the faster we can secure an ideal appointment for pickup, the faster we can match that load to the ideal carrier. That matters for the fluidity of their supply chain. A retailer can’t sell a product that hasn’t made it to a shelf. An automaker can’t make a car without all the parts. Our energy customers can’t restore power after a hurricane without poles and lines and transformers.

Speed-to-market also affects their transportation costs. Most carriers are regional and even when capacity is ample nationwide, only so many carriers are working in a given lane on any given day. Especially when it comes to unplanned freight, our research shows that shippers delayed in getting to the spot market can end up paying 23% to 35% extra. It’s the basic law of supply and demand. As the number of available trucks for the day goes down, the cost starts going up.

LM: What are the main competitive advantages of this for CHR?

Orth: The reason we can leverage generative AI like no one else is that we equip our tech with the largest dataset in the industry, the specialized expertise of our people and the details about individual customers’ needs. Our tech can mimic human cognition and perform work that our people would otherwise need to do, because we supply it with our knowledge about logistics, the market and specific customers—and we’ve taught the model how to apply the knowledge.

The No. 1 reason our customers say they do business with us is our people. Some of these relationships go back decades. That means your C.H. Robinson account team knows your company, your supply chain and your shipping needs. Now, we’re making use of that knowledge in new ways.

When we build our generative AI tools, we build in logic about logistics—like this mode operates this way and that mode operates that way. We coach the model how certain attributes of freight should determine what way it should be shipped and at what price, based on our real-time market intelligence. The details our people know about an individual customer, their locations, their service specifications and their special needs are also built in.

When we start using the tool, the customer’s account team reviews how it performs and provides feedback. Once they’re satisfied the model is working reliably, the account team can let our tech accomplish the task on its own. Even then, the AI tool knows when something is outside of parameters or so unique that it taps the person back in again for more input.”

This way our generative AI tools are continually learning not only from our historical and real-time data set, but also continually learning from our experts.