C.H. Robinson, a third-party logistics company expecting 2025 revenue close to $11 billion, has 30 agentic AI tools in use, according to CFO Damon Lee in an interview with FreightWaves. One agentic tool now lets the company respond to 100% of the rate quote requests it receives, up from about 60% to 65% when people handled them manually, and it answers each request in 32 seconds compared with 17 to 20 minutes for a human response. "We’re using bespoke customized AI solutions to drive demonstrable business results," Lee said.
Lee contrasted this with off-the-shelf AI. He said that in many cases it will be nothing but a cost adder, because the pay-by-the-drink model of AI is very expensive. C.H. Robinson instead has a team of 450 engineers writing its own AI applications, and they are the source of the 30 agentic tools.
The first tool Lee described handles quotes at North American Surface Transport (NAST), the division that includes the core over-the-road brokerage business. NAST receives requests for about 600,000 rate quotes each year. When a person did this manually, around a third of the requests either never got answers or were answered too late to meet customer expectations. With an agentic AI tool at the center of the process, the company responds to all of them. Lee said a human might use five to 10 data points to respond to a quote, while the tool has tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of data points available. He added that the company is now reaching a third of the available freight it never got to before.
The second tool is designed to optimize revenue management. Pricing strategy used to be set against a target such as a 40% gross margin rate, with loads accepted or rejected on that basis and results reviewed at the end of the month or quarter, and Lee said the strategy might go 30 or even 90 days without adjustments. With the in-house agentic tool, a strategy set at 8 a.m. on Monday is being tested by 8:05. The tool checks whether the strategy is yielding the expected volume and margin and, if not, changes it two minutes later, so the strategy is adjusted hundreds of times a day. Lee said that if volume is coming in hot the company can choose to optimize margin, and if there are fewer loads on the market it can price more aggressively. Lee called this approach "gross margin arbitrage" and said that previously playing that strategy was largely impossible. He said the company can optimize both price and cost because of how frequently it can test and react to the market. The article notes that C.H. Robinson's stock price grew 55.3% during 2025.