C.H. Robinson Cuts Freight Quotes From Days to Minutes With AI Agents

C.H. Robinson has cut freight price quotes from one to three days down to two to three minutes, using AI agents that have already produced more than 80,000 quotes for over 3,600 customers. The company announced on November 10, 2026 that it has expanded its AI systems beyond trucking into ocean shipping, air freight and customs brokerage — the core of its global forwarding business.

The scale is hard to overstate for the industry. A single shipping task at the company can now require more than a dozen AI agents working together, according to C.H. Robinson. The new agents handle price quotes for ocean and air cargo, support ocean bookings and assist with customs paperwork for shipments entering the United States.

Why does this matter for the freight market?

Freight forwarding is one of the most document-heavy, variable-heavy corners of global trade. Pricing often depends on a wider set of variables than trucking: the origin port, terminal charges, inland transport links and destination routing, all of which can change frequently. US customs brokerage, meanwhile, has become more labour-intensive as trade rules and tariffs have grown more complex — a direct consequence of the tariff turmoil of recent years.

That makes forwarding a prime target for agentic AI, and C.H. Robinson is one of the largest players attempting it. Mike Short, President of Global Forwarding, said the systems are changing the speed and consistency of operations for customers.

"As we've brought our AI playbook to global forwarding, the benefits keep compounding. Customers get the information they need sooner. Data is more consistent. Processes are more predictable. When plans change or disruptions occur, customers can evaluate a new routing, mode of shipping, schedule or price more quickly," Short said.

What changed in price quoting?

The numbers are the clearest signal of the shift. Before the AI agents, an air shipment quote took one day. An ocean shipment quote took two to three days. Both now take two to three minutes.

The agents have produced more than 80,000 quotes for more than 3,600 customers. Short framed the speed gain as a competitive weapon, not just an efficiency metric.

"Speed to market is also 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 for 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 smarter, faster and better," Short said.

The pricing problem is genuinely hard, and the company detailed why. Short used Shanghai as an example — a concrete case of how layered the variables get.

"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. 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," Short said.

That last detail matters. Separate agents now monitor terminal websites and email notices for fee changes, removing the need for staff in different time zones to gather that information manually — work that previously required phone calls to every terminal for every price quote.

The systems also handle ambiguity. Where a customer does not specify a port, the agents can suggest options based on the pickup point, sailing frequency and inland transport choices such as truck, rail or barge. The same process can identify a consolidation centre when freight needs to be grouped.

How did booking automation finally break through?

Ocean booking is where the company's history with technology is most instructive — and where the agentic approach claims its clearest win over earlier digital efforts.

The booking systems build on earlier digital booking forms and data exchange tools. But those efforts delivered only limited automation. C.H. Robinson had been developing digital booking forms and data exchange setups with customers for roughly a decade. The result: only about 5% automation for ocean and air booking requests.

Chief Technology Officer Mike Neill explained the structural reason that hill was so tough to climb: the booking doesn't come from the customer you quoted. It comes from the customer's suppliers.

"We have more work to do automating all the steps for booking, but this is already a major leap forward. 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," Neill said.

Ocean booking agents have now started managing the thousands of booking requests the company receives each week, removing manual handling from requests submitted by suppliers on behalf of customers.

What is happening in customs brokerage?

Customs brokerage is the third front, and it has become more labour-intensive as trade rules and tariffs have grown more complex. The new systems now handle more than four dozen document types arriving from shippers, carriers and government agencies.

The workflow is multi-step. Documents are split, classified and attached to shipments. Another agent extracts key data and checks whether any items are missing.

The measurable result: time spent on customs processing has been reduced by 23% so far. That frees customs brokers to focus on validation and compliance work — the judgment-heavy part of the job — rather than document shuffling.

How big is the AI operation behind this?

The company gave hard figures on the scale of its internal AI buildout. C.H. Robinson has built hundreds of proprietary AI agents since 2023. Those agents operate on 100 trillion data points and a context layer of customer-specific information, according to Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer Arun Rajan.

"When we built the first of our hundreds of proprietary AI agents in 2023, we were at the beginning of our company's transformation. 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," Rajan said.

The staffing behind it is substantial: 450 in-house software engineers and data scientists, who are still innovating in the company's trucking and 4PL businesses even as the focus widens to forwarding.

"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," Rajan said.

What comes next?

Neill was candid that booking automation remains incomplete — "we have more work to do automating all the steps for booking" — but the trajectory from 5% automation over a decade to agent-driven handling of thousands of weekly booking requests signals where the industry is heading. With quote times collapsed from days to minutes, customs processing time down 23%, and agentic coordination across a dozen-plus models per task, C.H. Robinson is betting that its 100-trillion-datapoint foundation and in-house engineering bench will widen a moat that competitors without comparable data will struggle to cross.