Logistics management company C.H. Robinson has automated email transactions with shippers using generative e artificial intelligence large language models (LLM), to offer shippers who use email the same speed-to market and cost savings as shippers who are more digitally connected to the company.     

The 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, ” 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.”           

The company says that, 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 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.