Digital Pulse: C.H. Robinson uses AI to respond to emails

Freight forwarder C.H. Robinson is using AI to automate transactions that many shippers conduct via email. [caption id="attachment_57137530" align="alignright" width="300"] (Courtesy/C.H. Robinson)[/caption] C.H. Robinson’s new technology classifies incoming email, reads it and replicates the steps a person would take to fulfill a customer’s request, according to a May 7 release from the company. This technology is particularly helpful in quote generation. Clients can get instant quotes through the forwarder’s Navisphere platform, but many clients prefer to email a quote request because email does not require the sender to fill in fields or enter a password, according to Mark Albrecht , vice president for AI at C.H. Robinson . The forwarder receives about 11,000 emails with quote requests daily, according to the release. “Before generative AI , replying to that email request defied automation,” Albrecht said in the release. “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 [of] 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 large language model the technology uses can be trained to identify an email about a load tender, a pickup appointment or a shipment tracking update, the release stated. For spot quotes, C.H. Robinson has already trained the AI model to differentiate between a quote request for truckload, less-than-truckload (LTL), intermodal or air cargo. The company is using the technology on truckload requests but developers are working on applying it to LTL price requests, before applying it to other areas, including air cargo. “After automating so many other types of customer transactions, you could call email the last mile,” Chief Operating Officer Arun Rajan said in the release. “We’d been exploring how to automate email requests for a couple of years through natural language processing and machine learning, but it would’ve been insanely hard and expensive. Then generative AI arrived, and we developed this automation technology so fast because we already had training data ready to go.” C.H. Robinson ranked 19th on Air Cargo Next ’s Power 25 list of top freight forwarders, moving 285,000 tonnes of air cargo in 2022. WebCargo adds Singapore Airlines capacity Singapore Airlines is the latest carrier to list its capacity on the WebCargo by Freightos digital booking platform, according to a May 2 release from Freightos. Bookings on WebCargo for shipments originating in Asia more than doubled in 2023 and continue to grow, according to the release. Listing Singapore Airlines capacity on WebCargo “allows us to double down on the recent surge in bookings from Asia,” Freightos Chief Revenue Officer Manuel Galindo said in the release. “This collaboration will enhance the booking experience for thousands of freight forwarders and will ultimately make world trade smoother.” Singapore Airlines operates a fleet of seven Boeing 747-400F freighters and more than 190 passenger aircraft, serving more than 120 destinations, according to the release. It ranked 15th on Air Cargo Next ’s Freight 50 list of top cargo carriers, flying 5.2 billion cargo tonne kilometers in 2022. Air Cargo Next has launched a business directory listing cargo carriers, service providers and technology companies. Each category has sub-categories, allowing users to find the right business to meet their needs. Users can also add their businesses to the directory and claim existing entries. Visit the Air Cargo Next Directory here.

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