C.H. Robinson, one of the world's largest third-party logistics providers with 2025 revenue approaching $11 billion, has built 30 agentic AI tools in-house through a team of 450 engineers, moving away from expensive pay-by-the-drink AI solutions. The company's CFO Damon Lee cited the impact in a FreightWaves interview: C.H. Robinson receives approximately 600,000 rate quote requests per year at its North American Surface Transport division. Historically, the company could manually respond to only 60-65% of those requests, with the remaining third either going unanswered or receiving responses that failed to meet customer timelines. With the agentic AI quoting tool at the center of the process, C.H. Robinson now responds to 100% of queries. The AI tool has access to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of data points for each quote decision, compared to the five to 10 data points a human broker might use. The result is a response time of 32 seconds per quote, replacing what was previously a 17 to 20 minute manual process. One agent is a revenue management optimization tool that can set a pricing strategy at 8 a.m. and automatically test and adjust that strategy hundreds of times per day, replacing a previous system with 30 to 90 day adjustment cycles. C.H. Robinson's Lean AI approach was validated across a January 2024 to January 2026 analysis showing statistically significant relationships between AI use and improved outcomes including 11% faster speed-to-market and 7% improvement in on-time pickups. An orders agent reads and interprets emailed tenders including attachments and builds orders in approximately 90 seconds, processing 5,500 truckload orders per day and saving an estimated 600 hours of labor daily. The Always On Logistics Planner serves as the orchestration layer across shipping task agents, enabling end-to-end workflow synchronization across pricing, planning, orders, appointments, freight matching, capacity securing, shipment consolidation and timing, freight tracking, ETA prediction, document handling, and invoicing.
Details
- City
- Eden Prairie
- Organization
- C.H. Robinson
- Continent
- North America