Using Generative AI, C.H. Robinson Has Achieved Automation Across the Entire Lifecycle of a Freight Shipment
October 31 2024 - 8:00AM
Business Wire
With over 10,000 email transactions per day
no longer done manually, new proprietary tech serves
customers in seconds instead of hours
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.”
ABOUT C.H. ROBINSON C.H. Robinson delivers logistics like
no one else™. Companies around the world look to us to reimagine
supply chains, advance freight technology and solve logistics
challenges—from the simple to the most complex. Over 90,000
customers and 450,000 contract carriers in our network trust us to
manage $22 billion in freight annually. Through our unmatched
expertise, unrivaled scale and tailored solutions, we ensure the
seamless delivery of goods across industries and continents via
truckload, less-than-truckload, ocean, air and beyond. As a
responsible global citizen, we make supply chains more sustainable
and proudly contribute millions to the causes that matter most to
our employees. For more information, go to www.chrobinson.com.
(Nasdaq: CHRW)
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Maria Lettman maria.lettman@chrobinson.com
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