C.H. Robinson Debuts Lean AI for Ocean Shipping, Air Freight and Customs

Mike Short, President of Global Forwarding at C.H. Robinson

“As we’ve brought our AI playbook to global forwarding, the benefits keep compounding”

Mike Short, President of Global Forwarding at C.H. Robinson

“Customers have information they need sooner. Data is more consistent. Processes are more predictable. When plans change or disruptions occur, customers can more quickly evaluate a new routing, mode of shipping, schedule or price. Not to mention speed-to-market is a real competitive advantage. The faster we get you a quote and handle your booking, the faster you get the ideal carrier and the ideal sailing or flight. For a vessel on the water 15 to 35 days, you don’t want to wait weeks for the next one. For an air shipment, life-saving medicines, perishable produce and critical automotive parts absolutely must arrive on time. Our Lean AI makes your supply chain a smarter, faster, better one.”

Mike Short, President of Global Forwarding at C.H. Robinson

“With our maturity in using AI to augment our talented experts, only C.H. Robinson is equipped to transform something as complicated as freight forwarding”

Mike Short, President of Global Forwarding at C.H. Robinson

“A shipper may ask us to get product from their factory in Germany to a retailer in Chicago”

Mike Neill, Chief Technology Officer at C.H. Robinson

“We have more work to do automating all the steps for booking, but this is already a major leap forward”

Mike Neill, Chief Technology Officer at C.H. Robinson

“Before agentic AI, we’d developed digital booking forms and data exchange setups with customers, but over the course of about 10 years achieved only about 5% automation for ocean and air booking requests. Why was that such a tough hill to climb? Primarily because you quote your customer, then it’s their suppliers booking with you. A customer might have 50 suppliers. With our agentic AI, all those booking requests no longer need to be handled manually.”

Arun Rajan, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at C.H. Robinson

“When we built the first of our hundreds of proprietary AI agents in 2023, we were at the beginning of our company’s transformation”

Arun Rajan, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at C.H. Robinson

“We continue making disciplined choices about where we deploy Lean AI. Our AI agents continue to operate on 100 trillion data points and a context layer of customer-specific information that simply cannot be replicated elsewhere. While our 450 in-house software engineers and data scientists are still innovating in our trucking and 4PL businesses, now we’re using those advantages to widen our competitive moat in global forwarding.”