Third party logistics provider (3PL) C.H. Robinson has applied generative AI tools to automate various steps across the entire lifecycle of a freight shipment, the Minnesota company said last week.
C.H. Robinson said it created AI-based technology that reads incoming email then replicates tasks a person would do, including giving customers a price quote, accepting a load, setting appointments for pickup and delivery, and checking on the load in transit. The company has used the approach to automate more than 10,000 of those routine transactions per day, allowing shippers who use email to get the same speed-to-market and cost savings as customers who use C.H. Robinson’s online platform.
After starting with price quotes, the company said it has applied generative AI to increasingly complex tasks. “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,” Arun Rajan, the company’s Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, said in a release. “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.”
The technology also saves time, cutting the task for a person to take care of an emailed load tender from as much as four hours to 90 seconds, according to Mark Albrecht, the company’s Vice President for Artificial Intelligence.
“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.”
