C.H. Robinson Debuts Lean AI for Ocean Shipping, Air Freight and Customs

Customs automation has reduced time spent by 23%, while worldwide deployment of ocean-booking agents is expected in Q1 2027.

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Global logistic provider’s fleet of AI agents grows, bringing greater speed, precision and agility to supply chains around the world

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- As the global leader in Lean AI, C.H. Robinson has launched new AI agents that perform work in ocean shipping, air freight and customs brokerage. They represent an expansion of the company’s Lean AI capabilities into freight forwarding, for the benefit of more customers, and into work so complex that a single shipping task can require over a dozen AI agents working in tandem.

Continuing to disrupt itself and the industry, the company’s new tech brings substantial speed-to-market gains, precision and agility to customers’ supply chains without sacrificing human oversight or personal attention.

The new tech includes:

• Price-quoting for ocean and air cargo: AI has determined and delivered over 80,000 price quotes for over 3,600 customers. Quotes that used to take a day for an air shipment and two to three days for an ocean shipment now take two to three minutes.
• Ocean booking: AI has begun to manage the thousands of booking requests C.H. Robinson receives every week.
• Customs: AI helps with the dozens of documents and highly detailed processes required for an international shipment to clear U.S. Customs – work that has only gotten more labor-intensive with new trade agreements, layers of new tariffs, and stricter compliance rules.

“As we’ve brought our AI playbook to global forwarding, the benefits keep compounding,” said Mike Short, President of Global Forwarding. “Customers have information they need sooner. Data is more consistent. Processes are more predictable. When plans change or disruptions occur, customers can more quickly evaluate a new routing, mode of shipping, schedule or price. Not to mention speed-to-market is a real competitive advantage. The faster we get you a quote and handle your booking, the faster you get the ideal carrier and the ideal sailing or flight. For a vessel on the water 15 to 35 days, you don’t want to wait weeks for the next one. For an air shipment, life-saving medicines, perishable produce and critical automotive parts absolutely must arrive on time. Our Lean AI makes your supply chain a smarter, faster, better one.”

In trucking, a single C.H. Robinson AI agent handles price quotes for truckload, less-than-truckload (LTL), temp-controlled, flatbed and hotshot shipments. Replicating the extensive manual process for pricing ocean freight meant building multiple AI agents and subagents. Together, they decipher what a shipper needs, seek information from external parties, consider variables at origin and destination, and make decisions like routing.

“With our maturity in using AI to augment our talented experts, only C.H. Robinson is equipped to transform something as complicated as freight forwarding,” said Short. “Take a shipment out of Shanghai, for example. To price that, an AI agent first has to decipher which of the two ports in Shanghai the shipper means. One is a longer haul to get to and there’s a toll on the way, plus the 43 terminals charge different fees. The terminal fees at origin and destination change constantly. So another AI agent checks their websites every day and monitors emails for fee notices. That way people in two different time zones don’t have to call every terminal for every price quote.”

If the shipper doesn’t designate a port, other AI agents step in: “A shipper may ask us to get product from their factory in Germany to a retailer in Chicago,” Short said. “One of our AI agents considers the pickup location and can suggest the best port based on our deep data – maybe Hamburg or Bremerhaven there in Germany, or the Netherlands given the more frequent sailings out of Rotterdam. It can also suggest the inland routing by either truck, rail or barge and the destination port. For freight needing to be consolidated, an AI agent chooses the best consolidation center.”

The most mature of the freight forwarding AI tech, price quoting first launched in 2025 for less-than-container-load (LCL) ocean freight for U.S. and Canada customers. These agents now also handle price quotes for full-container ocean freight as well as air cargo and serve customers in Mexico, Europe, Latin America and Oceania. They’re being piloted for customers in China and are expected to go live for customers in Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East and Africa yet in Q4 2026.

Another set of AI agents manages requests for ocean bookings. They 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. One of those AI agents enhances booking requests with customer-specific context, ensuring the other agents operate with maximum efficiency while still taking into account individual customer preferences, requirements and procedures for their shipments.

“We have more work to do automating all the steps for booking, but this is already a major leap forward,” said Mike Neill, Chief Technology Officer. “Before agentic AI, we’d developed digital booking forms and data exchange setups with customers, but over the course of about 10 years achieved only about 5% automation for ocean and air booking requests. Why was that such a tough hill to climb? Primarily because you quote your customer, then it’s their suppliers booking with you. A customer might have 50 suppliers. With our agentic AI, all those booking requests no longer need to be handled manually.”

The new AI agents and automations that assist C.H. Robinson’s Customs team are tackling what had been manual handling of over four dozen types of documents from shippers, carriers and government agencies needed to clear U.S. Customs. Incoming documents are split up, classified and attached to their individual shipments. An AI agent extracts necessary data, while the system monitors for missing documents and requests them. Automated invoices and information packets are sent out at the end. So far, time spent has been reduced 23%, allowing the company’s customs brokers to focus on critical validation and compliance steps.

“When we built the first of our hundreds of proprietary AI agents in 2023, we were at the beginning of our company’s transformation,” said Arun Rajan, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer. “We continue making disciplined choices about where we deploy Lean AI. Our AI agents continue to operate on 100 trillion data points and a context layer of customer-specific information that simply cannot be replicated elsewhere. While our 450 in-house software engineers and data scientists are still innovating in our trucking and 4PL businesses, now we’re using those advantages to widen our competitive moat in global forwarding.”

ABOUT C.H. ROBINSON

C.H. Robinson is the global leader in Lean AI supply chains. For more than a century, companies everywhere have looked to us to reimagine how goods move. Now, as we redefine what’s next for the industry, that same drive fuels our commitment to Building Tomorrow’s Supply Chains, Today™. Trusted by 75,000 customers and 450,000 carriers, we manage an unmatched 37 million shipments annually, representing $23 billion in freight. We deliver tailored solutions across the world via truckload, less-than-truckload, ocean, air and more. With our unique combination of human insight and Lean AI working as one, supply chains move faster, smarter and more sustainably. As a responsible global citizen, we proudly contribute millions to the causes that matter most to our employees. Find out more at chrobinson.com. (Nasdaq: CHRW)

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View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261026145084/en/

Maria Lettman, maria.lettman@chrobinson.com

Source: C.H. Robinson

Key Terms

less-than-truckload (ltl) technical

Less-than-truckload (LTL) is a shipping method that combines multiple smaller shipments from different customers into a single truck, like sharing a car instead of each person driving separately. It matters to investors because LTL affects companies’ delivery costs, inventory speed and reliability, and how efficiently supply chains operate—factors that influence profit margins, pricing power and the ability to meet customer demand.

less-than-container-load (lcl) technical

Cargo that does not fill a standard ocean or intermodal shipping container and therefore is grouped (consolidated) with other shippers’ goods in the same container. LCL shipments are priced and documented per cubic metre or per weight and require consolidation at origin and deconsolidation at destination, which can add handling steps and affect transit time and scheduling compared with a full-container (FCL) shipment.