Manufacturing
Deployment record
In the tracker →- Organisation
- C.H. Robinson
- System
- AI agents
- Stage
- Pilot
- Function
- ocean shipping, air freight, customs brokerage
- Scale
- 75,000 customers
- 01C.H. Robinson launched AI agents for ocean shipping, air freight, and customs brokerage on October 26, 2026.
- 02The AI has delivered over 80,000 price quotes for more than 3,600 customers, reducing quote times from days to minutes.
- 03In customs, AI agents process over 48 document types, reducing time spent by 23% and allowing brokers to focus on validation and compliance.
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- 04The AI price quoting capability, initially launched in 2025, now covers full-container ocean freight and air cargo for multiple regions and is expanding globally.
- 05C.H. Robinson manages 37 million shipments annually, representing $23 billion in freight for 75,000 customers, supported by 450 software engineers and data scientists.
C.H. Robinson
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C.H. Robinson announced on October 26, 2026 that it has launched new AI agents that perform work in ocean shipping, air freight, and customs brokerage.
The company said the work is complex enough that a single shipping task can require more than a dozen AI agents working together.
Price quoting is the most mature of the new capabilities. C.H. Robinson said its AI has delivered over 80,000 price quotes for more than 3,600 customers. Quotes that previously took a day for an air shipment and two to three days for an ocean shipment now take two to three minutes.
In trucking, a single C.H. Robinson agent handles price quotes across shipment types. Ocean freight required multiple agents and subagents that interpret what a shipper needs, gather information from outside parties, weigh variables at origin and destination, and decide on routing.
Mike Short, President of Global Forwarding, said one agent checks terminal websites daily and monitors emails for fee notices, so staff in different time zones no longer have to call every terminal for each quote.
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A separate set of agents manages ocean booking requests. CTO Mike Neill said that before agentic AI, the company had built digital booking forms and data exchanges with customers, but "over the course of about 10 years achieved only about 5% automation for ocean and air booking requests." He said the difficulty is that a customer might have 50 suppliers booking on its behalf.
In customs, AI agents process more than four dozen types of documents from shippers, carriers, and government agencies needed to clear U.S. Customs.
Documents are classified and attached to shipments, data is extracted, and missing documents are requested automatically. Time spent has fallen 23%, the company said, letting customs brokers focus on validation and compliance.
Price quoting launched in 2025 for less-than-container-load ocean freight for U.S. and Canada customers, and now covers full-container ocean freight and air cargo for customers in Mexico, Europe, Latin America, and Oceania.
It is being piloted in China and is expected to launch in Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and Africa in Q4 2026. The booking agents launched in China in August, will roll out to the rest of Asia in Q4, and are expected to be live globally in Q1 2027.
Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer Arun Rajan said the company built the first of its hundreds of proprietary AI agents in 2023. The agents operate on 100 trillion data points, supported by 450 in-house software engineers and data scientists. C.H. Robinson manages 37 million shipments a year, representing $23 billion in freight, for 75,000 customers.
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