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CH Robinson Worldwide is gradually transitioning its operations to artificial intelligence technology as the commodities brokerage giant seeks to boost productivity.
In recent months, the company has announced various efforts to automate logistics management processes, such as responding to quotation requests sent via e-mail by the loaders and contactless dating. These moves aim to free up time for its shrinking workforce to focus on customer retention and relationship building as well as growing revenue.
CH Robinson’s strategy appears to be paying off, according to broker executives earnings call last week. President and CEO Dave Bozeman — who was hired in 2023 to improve efficiency — said he was encouraged by the company’s productivity improvements. Later on the call, COO Arjun Rajan credited the company’s use of generative artificial intelligence in day-to-day operations as the source of the new improvements.
Rajan said concurrent workflows helped eliminate productivity bottlenecks in Q1, improving customer and carrier experiences.
“One of these workflows aims to use genetic AI to automatically respond to trade truck offer emails to increase speed to market, increase addressed demand and reduce manual touches,” he said.
How GenAI is used for email promotions
CH Robinson sees RFPs sent via email as an important use case for building artificial intelligence. Process automation can eliminate human involvement in mundane tasks, allowing staff to focus on higher-performing activities such as selling and troubleshooting.
“Responding to transaction load quote requests is time-consuming for account teams, and we need to respond quickly to be competitive,” said Rajan. “Through our automated process and using GenAI technology, more than 2,000 trucking customers benefit from faster response time with our automated email offers, and we will continue to scale this technology to cover more customers and other modes of operation.”
The company started by developing proprietary technology that uses artificial intelligence to sort and read incoming emails. The AI then determines whether the survey was asking for a quote and, if so, will respond with pricing.
The company said the automated process can provide a quote in just over 2 minutes. The system responds to 2,000 customer offers daily, CH Robinson said, noting that the achievement opens the door to automating other transactions that shippers and carriers choose to do via email.
While the company has other technology and applications that can provide instant pricing, the AI-enabled solution is a breakthrough for customers who prefer email, Mark Albrecht, VP of AI, said in the release.
“Email works the same for everyone,” he said. “There are no fields to fill in.”
With the numbers
11,000
The number of emails per day that CH Robinson receives from shippers and carriers requesting pricing
2,268
The number of CH Robinson trucking customers who have seen the benefits of automated emails
1 billion+
The number of appointments made each year in the trucking industry, according to CH Robinson
Contactless dating leverages a similar solution
Months before CH Robinson launched automated email offers, the company launched another productivity-enhancing solution: contactless appointments.
“It’s much more efficient for technology to find a rendezvous slot that’s open, that works for both the loading dock and the carrier, and gets the cargo where it needs to be on time,” said Michael Castagnetto, president of surface transportation. in North America. The announcement.
The two solutions have several similarities. First, CH Robinson markets them for their ability to free up staff time for other, more productive tasks. But second, they both rely on artificial intelligence to solve one of logistics’ long-standing technical challenges – reading and responding to emails.
Noah Hoffman, vice president of surface transportation in North America, explained the significance of the technological breakthrough in a March interview.
Hoffman said that when he started working at CH Robinson about 20 years ago, his office had two phones — one for receiving shipments and one for communicating with pick-up points. Although much has changed since then, the appointment scheduling process is often still labor-intensive, requiring employees to look up cargo details such as cargo pick-up times, ready dates, or labor availability, and then match them with the ideal appointment time in various technological systems.
Artificial intelligence has allowed CH Robinson to automate many steps in that process, such as instantly matching appointment availability to book an ideal time, Hoffman said. Just as importantly, technology helps even when senders prefer to exchange details via email — as AI is able to sift through emails for key information and automate CH Robinson’s side of the process.
The result, Hoffman said, has been higher service for customers using the technology, which, as of March, were primarily in the food and beverage space.
“Leveraging scale with our data and then powering an automated process that leverages AI to find optimal appointments results in a higher level of service from both on-time pickup and on-time delivery,” he said. Hoffman.
Service, productivity and leveraging scale for competitive advantage were also themes executives highlighted on CH Robinson’s earnings calls when discussing the technology.
The technology will be key to achieving the company’s goals of boosting North American surface freight shipments by 15% per person per day and increasing Global Forwarding shipments by 10% per person per month, COO CH Robinson said in earnings call.
“GenAI puts the power of large language models in the hands of our frontline teams,” said Rajan. “With more data and history to leverage than any other 3PL, we have opportunities to leverage the power that Generative AI now offers to further leverage our intelligence advantage, and we will continue to seek and pursue these opportunities.”