CH Robinson's AI Agents Have Delivered 80,000 Quotes in Minutes, Not Days

CH Robinson's AI agents have produced more than 80,000 price quotes for over 3,600 customers, compressing turnaround times from days to roughly two to three minutes. Quotes that once took a full day for air shipments and two to three days for ocean now land while the customer is still on the phone, according to figures reported by Air Cargo News.

That's not an incremental gain. It's a roughly 500-fold speed improvement on ocean quotes, achieved in months rather than years.

What do the AI agents actually do?

The deployment covers two functions at the heart of CH Robinson's forwarding operation: pricing and customs document processing. On the quoting side, the AI handles the full cycle — generating and returning prices — without manual intervention.

The customs side is arguably the bigger story. The system splits, classifies and attaches incoming documents to individual shipments and extracts the required data automatically. It also spots missing documents and requests them without a human prompting it to do so. Before this, CH Robinson staff processed around four dozen document types by hand to clear US Customs.

The result: time spent on customs processing has fallen 23%. That matters because the workload is growing, not shrinking. New trade agreements, tariffs and compliance rules have made document handling more labour-intensive, so a 23% efficiency gain arrives exactly when forwarders need the extra capacity.

A decade of digital effort bought 5%

The most revealing number in this story is the one CH Robinson didn't want to hide. Chief technology officer Mike Neill put the previous track record bluntly: "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."

Read that again. Ten years of conventional digitisation — booking forms, EDI setups, the usual toolkit — moved the automation needle by five percentage points. Agentic AI has moved it considerably further in a fraction of that time. Mike Short, president of global forwarding at CH Robinson, has been named alongside Neill in the company's announcements of the programme.

For anyone who has sat through a decade of forwarder "digital transformation" decks, this comparison stings a little. The technology everyone spent the 2010s building was, it turns out, the warm-up act.

What does this change for shippers and forwarders?

For shippers, faster quotes mean faster decisions. A two-minute ocean quote lets a supply chain team compare options and book in a single working session rather than across three days of email chains. Speed on the quoting desk increasingly shapes which forwarder wins the shipment.

For CH Robinson's competitors, the pressure is now structural. Quoting speed and customs efficiency are areas where forwarders compete directly. If one major player returns air quotes in minutes, a rival still quoting next Tuesday has a commercial problem, not a technology problem.

For the customs function, the stakes sit in regulatory drift. As tariffs and compliance regimes multiply, document volume per shipment rises. Automating classification and document-chasing converts a growing fixed cost into a scalable one — and frees staff for exceptions rather than data entry.

The wider picture

The air cargo market is reorganising around speed and automation, and the pace is accelerating. Carriers are repositioning commercially — TAP Air Portugal's growing interest in cargo demand for new routes, and the structural changes following Lufthansa's acquisition of a stake in the Portuguese carrier, sit in the same frame. Technology investment by major forwarders like CH Robinson is part of that same shift.

The gap between a ten-year 5% automation rate and what agentic AI has delivered since is the telling detail. Expect the next round of forwarder earnings calls to feature automation percentages as prominently as gross margin — and expect those numbers to keep climbing.