New C.H. Robinson Technology Breaks a Decades-Old Barrier to Automation in the Logistics Industry
May 07 2024 - 8:00AM
Business Wire
Artificial intelligence now reads and
replies to 2,000 emailed quote requests a day
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.
“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.”
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.
For spot quotes, C.H. Robinson has already trained the model to
differentiate between a quote request for truckload,
less-than-truckload (LTL), intermodal or air freight.
So far, 2,268 of C.H. Robinson’s truckload customers are getting
the benefits of automated email quotes. The faster a shipper gets a
price quote and secures a carrier to pick up their freight, the
less likely they’ll need to pay a premium. Speed matters in the
spot market because most carriers are regional and only so many are
working a given shipping lane on a given day. MIT research shows
that shippers delayed in getting to the spot market can end up
paying 23% to 35% extra on their shipment.
C.H. Robinson developers are now working on applying the
technology to LTL price requests, which will be especially valuable
to the company’s portfolio of small-business customers that rely on
email. A pilot using AI for price requests on expedited freight is
also under way, with automotive customers that ship parts critical
to just-in-time manufacturing.
“After automating so many other types of customer transactions,
you could call email the last mile,” said Arun Rajan, Chief
Operating Officer. “We’d been exploring how to automate email
requests for a couple of years through natural language processing
and machine learning, but it would’ve been insanely hard and
expensive. Then generative AI arrived, and we developed this
automation technology so fast because we already had training data
ready to go. The good news for our customers is that they still get
what they need using email, while our supply chain experts are
freed up to do work that’s higher value for them, our customers and
our company’s growth.”
About C.H. Robinson
C.H. Robinson solves logistics problems for companies across the
globe and across industries, from the simple to the most complex.
With $22 billion in freight under management and 19 million
shipments annually, we are one of the world’s largest logistics
platforms. Our global suite of services accelerates trade to
seamlessly deliver the products and goods that drive the world’s
economy. With the combination of our multimodal transportation
management system and expertise, we use our information advantage
to deliver smarter solutions for more than 90,000 customers and
450,000 contract carriers on our platform. Our technology is built
by and for supply chain experts to bring faster, more meaningful
improvements to our customers’ businesses. As a responsible global
citizen, we are also proud to contribute millions of dollars to
support causes that matter to our company, our Foundation and our
employees. For more information, visit us at www.chrobinson.com
(Nasdaq: CHRW).
CHRW-IR
View source
version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240507658056/en/
Maria Lettman, maria.lettman@chrobinson.com
CH Robinson Worldwide (NASDAQ:CHRW)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2024 to May 2024
CH Robinson Worldwide (NASDAQ:CHRW)
Historical Stock Chart
From May 2023 to May 2024