Automated Quoting
Assembly Line
New C.H. Robinson Technology Breaks a Decades-Old Barrier to Automation in the Logistics Industry
In another industry-leading innovation, C.H. Robinson has automated transactions that many shippers still conduct by email. It breaks a long-standing barrier to automation and gives shippers who use email the same speed-to market and cost savings as shippers who are more digitally connected.
Using artificial intelligence, C.H. Robinson’s new technology classifies incoming email, reads it and replicates the steps a person would take to fulfill a customer’s request. For example, shippers often still choose to send an email asking for a price quote rather than log into a digital platform. On an average business day, the global logistics company receives over 11,000 emails from customers and carriers requesting pricing on truckload freight. While the technology is replying to 2,000 customer quote requests a day, it opens the door to automating other transactions shippers and carriers choose to do by email. The large language model (LLM) the technology uses can be trained to identify an email about a load tender, a pickup appointment or a shipment tracking update.
“Our customers can get instant price quotes through our Navisphere platform or any of the 35 largest TMS or ERP systems we’re integrated with. But for someone like a busy warehouse manager with unexpected spot freight or freight in a new lane, an email can just feel easier. Email works the same for everybody. It doesn’t ask for your password. There are no fields to fill in,” said Mark Albrecht, Vice President for Artificial Intelligence. “Before generative AI, replying to that email request defied automation. Customers had to wait for a human just to pass along a quote from our Dynamic Pricing Engine. Now, our new technology reads the email and supplies the quote in an average 2 minutes 13 seconds. C.H. Robinson is doing this at scale, leaving our people more time to help those same customers with more complex requests.”