Logistics / Third-party logistics
C.H. Robinson: AI intake of emailed freight orders and scheduling of pickup and delivery appointments
- Company
- C.H. Robinson
- Country
- United States
- Adoption stage
- In operation
- Source published
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Read the full source text
The work problem
According to a press release C.H. Robinson issued on April 16, 2025, the company handles 37 million shipments a year, and freight orders that shippers sent by email were opened and processed one by one by staff in an email queue. Shippers could wait up to 4 hours for a person to get to their shipment.
Technology and data
C.H. Robinson attached generative AI agents it built in house to each step of the freight shipment lifecycle. Its orders agent reads and processes freight orders that arrive by email; it was first applied to emails from the biggest customers with the most truckload volume and in 2025 was extended to small and medium business customers who are heavy users of email and less-than-truckload (LTL) shipping. A separate appointments agent sets pickup and delivery times. According to a press release dated March 11, 2026, hundreds of agents orchestrated by the Always-on Logistics Planner handle orders, appointments and carrier selection in sequence. The company said its people can spend more time on the most complex shipments and the most pressing disruptions.
Results
According to the 2025 press release, orders processed by AI reached 1 million in March of that year, and in February and March the AI handled as many LTL orders as truckload orders. More than 5,200 customers get their loads accepted in under 90 seconds, and the appointments agent has set more than 1 million appointments. In the 2026 press release, the company said truckload shipments handled by its AI-powered orders and appointments workflows reached the market up to 23% faster and saw up to a 35% increase in on-time pickups.
Limits and open questions
Order processing accuracy and the share corrected by people are not in the source, and the 2026 figures are given only as maximums.
Sources
- At C.H. Robinson, Artificial Intelligence Has Now Performed Over 3 Million Shipping Taskschrobinson.com, Accessed
- More than 100 trillion data points fuel C.H. Robinson's leadership in Agentic Supply Chainschrobinson.com, Accessed
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.