C.H. Robinson announced plans to automate transactions, breaking a long-standing barrier to automation and giving shippers who use email the same speed-to-market as shippers who are more digitally connected.
“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,” says Mark Albrecht, VP 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.”
Key takeaways:
- Using artificial intelligence (AI), 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 still choose to send an email asking for a price quote rather than log into a digital platform.
- 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) 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 trained the model to differentiate between a quote request for truckload, less-than-truckload (LTL), intermodal or air freight.
“After automating so many other types of customer transactions, you could call email the last mile,” says 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.”
