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Global logistics provider C.H. Robinson launched new AI agents that speed up and efficiently perform complex work in ocean shipping, air freight and customs brokerage
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For ocean and air cargo, price-quoting that used to take a day for an air shipment and two to three days for an ocean shipment now take two to three minutes
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For customs, Lean AI agents help with the dozens of documents and highly detailed processes required for an international shipment
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Initially deployed for customers in the U.S. and Canada, the AI technology is now also being used in Mexico, Europe, Latin America and Oceania, and pilot runs are underway in China, Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East and Africa
Global logistics provider C.H. Robinson has launched new artificial intelligence (AI) agents that speed up and efficiently perform complex work in ocean shipping, air freight and customs brokerage.
“As we’ve brought our AI playbook to global forwarding, the benefits keep compounding,” Mike Short, president of C.H. Robinson’s Global Forwarding, said.
“When plans change or disruptions occur, customers can more quickly evaluate a new routing, mode of shipping, schedule or price,” he explained. “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.”
The company’s latest Lean AI capabilities – developed based on its “Lean” framework of creating the best value with fewer resources and waste, partnered with AI technology human expertise – brings substantial speed-to-market gains, and precision and agility to customers’ supply chains without sacrificing human oversight.
“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,” said Short.
The new fleet of Lean AI agents includes:
- Price-quoting for ocean and air cargo – AI has determined and delivered over 80,000 price quotes for over 3,600 customers. Quotes that used to take a day for an air shipment and two to three days for an ocean shipment now take two to three minutes.
- Ocean booking – AI has begun to manage the thousands of booking requests C.H. Robinson receives every week.
- Customs – AI helps with the dozens of documents and highly detailed processes required for an international shipment to clear U.S. Customs – work that has only gotten more labor-intensive with new trade agreements, layers of new tariffs, and stricter compliance rules.
How do the AI agents work?
“When we built the first of our hundreds of proprietary AI agents in 2023, we were at the beginning of our company’s transformation,” said Arun Rajan, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer.
“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,” Rajan added.
In trucking, a single C.H. Robinson AI agent handles price quotes for truckload, less-than-truckload (LTL), temp-controlled, flatbed and hotshot shipments. Multiple AI agents and subagents were developed to replicate the extensive manual process for pricing ocean freight. Together, the AI agents decipher what a shipper needs, seek information from external parties, consider variables at origin and destination, and make decisions like routing.
“Take a shipment out of Shanghai, for example. To price that, an AI agent first has to decipher which of the two ports in Shanghai the shipper means. One is a longer haul to get to and there’s a toll on the way, plus the 43 terminals charge different fees. The terminal fees at origin and destination change constantly. So another AI agent checks their websites every day and monitors emails for fee notices. That way people in two different time zones don’t have to call every terminal for every price quote,” Short explained.
Deployed across continents
The most mature of the freight forwarding AI tech, price quoting, was first launched in 2025 for less-than-container-load (LCL) ocean freight for the United States and Canada customers.
C.H. Robinson said these agents now also handle price quotes for full-container ocean freight as well as air cargo and serve customers in Mexico, Europe, Latin America and Oceania. Pilot deployment is also ongoing for customers in China and are expected to go live for customers in Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East and Africa in the fourth quarter this year.
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Another set of AI agents manages requests for ocean bookings. Launched in China in August, these will roll out to the rest of Asia in the fourth quarter and are expected to be live globally in the first quarter of 2027. One of those AI agents enhances booking requests with customer-specific context, ensuring the other agents operate with maximum efficiency while still taking into account individual customer preferences, requirements and procedures for their shipments.
“We have more work to do automating all the steps for booking, but this is already a major leap forward,” said Mike Neill, chief technology officer.
“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,” Neill said. “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.”
READ: AI moves from assistant to autonomous actor in supply chains: DHL report
