Tuesday, October 27, 2026
The news that moves freight
Tech & AI Oct 27, 2026 · 7 min read

C.H. Robinson brings AI agents into forwarding

C.H. Robinson’s AI quotes in minutes. The 5% booking figure is the real test. C.H. Robinson says its AI pricing agents have produced more than 80,000 quotes for over 3,600 customers. Air quotes that took a day, and ocean quotes that took two to three days, now take two to three minutes, The Loadstar reports. Our view: fast quotes will soon be expected from every forwarder. The harder prize is booking. CTO Mike Neill said ten years of digital forms automated only about 5% of booking requests. Q2 forwarding operating profit rose 18.8% while headcount fell 16.6%. We expect Q3 results on 28 October to show forwarding headcount down at least 10% again.

Quotes in three minutes are easy to copy. Bookings from 50 suppliers are not

C.H. Robinson says its AI pricing agents have now produced more than 80,000 freight quotes for over 3,600 customers. The company says the wait has collapsed. In its words: “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.” The Loadstar and Air Cargo News both reported the figures on Monday 26 October.

The announcement covers three areas. Pricing agents now quote FCL (full container load) and airfreight across several regions, after starting with North American LCL (less than container load, or shared-container) shipments in 2025. Ocean booking agents went live in China in August. And AI agents now handle part of the document work in US customs brokerage. The Loadstar says some tasks need more than a dozen agents working together. An “AI agent” here means software that carries out a task from start to finish, such as reading an email and creating a booking, rather than just answering a question.

The timing matters. C.H. Robinson reports third-quarter results on Wednesday 28 October, according to Earnings Whispers.

What we think it means

Our view is that the quote-speed number is the least durable part of this story. Fast quotes are a feature that every serious forwarder will offer within a year. Shippers will stop being impressed and simply expect it.

The more important part is booking. Here C.H. Robinson made an unusually frank admission. If it can automate supplier bookings at scale, that is much harder for rivals to copy than a quick quote. It is also where the labour savings sit.

We also think investors and rivals should read this mainly as a cost story for now, not a growth story. The company’s own second-quarter numbers point that way.

The admission: 5% after ten years

CTO Mike Neill told The Loadstar that before agentic AI, the company spent about ten years building digital booking forms and data exchange set-ups with customers. Those efforts automated only about 5% of ocean and air booking requests, the article reports.

He explained why. “Why was that such a tough hill to climb?” he asked. The customer agrees the quote, but its suppliers do the booking. “A customer might have 50 suppliers,” Neill said. In our view, getting 50 suppliers to adopt one portal is close to impossible.

His claim is that AI removes that need. “With our agentic AI, all those booking requests no longer need to be handled manually,” he said. As we read it, the aim is for software to turn whatever the supplier sends into a booking.

He did not overstate it. “We have more work to do automating all the steps for booking, but this is already a major leap forward,” Neill said.

The rollout is staged. China went live in August. The rest of Asia is due in Q4 2026. A global rollout is expected in Q1 2027, The Loadstar reports. The company did not publish what share of bookings the agents now handle in China. That is the number we would most like to see.

The small jobs that eat a pricing desk

Mike Short, president of Global Forwarding, gave a good example of why quotes used to take days. “The terminal fees at origin and destination change constantly,” he told The Loadstar. Terminal fees are the charges a port terminal levies for handling a container, and they are often passed through to the shipper.

“So another AI agent checks their websites every day and monitors emails for fee notices,” Short said. “That way people in two different time zones don’t have to call every terminal for every price quote.” The Loadstar cites Shanghai, where the choice of port and terminal affects inland transport costs and fees.

This is the unglamorous core of forwarding. A quote is not one rate. It is a stack of carrier rates, surcharges, terminal charges and trucking, each from a different source. Automating the lookups is where the hours go.

Customs is similar. Air Cargo News reports that staff handled about four dozen document types for US Customs clearance. An AI agent now pulls out the data, flags missing documents and asks for them. The company reports a 23% cut in time spent on that work. It says brokers now spend more time on checking and compliance. Customs work has grown heavier with new tariffs, new trade deals and stricter rules, the company says.

What the numbers show so far

The financial results back our “cost first” reading. In the second quarter of 2026, Global Forwarding income from operations rose 18.8% year on year to $61.0 million, according to the company’s earnings release filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Average headcount in the segment fell 16.6%.

But adjusted gross profit, which is revenue minus what the forwarder pays carriers, rose just 0.7% to $188.8 million. Ocean adjusted gross profit fell 2.8% on shipments up 1.0%. Customs adjusted gross profit fell 9.4%. Air was the bright spot, with adjusted gross profit up 23.4% even as tonnage fell 7.5%.

So profit grew because costs fell, mostly people, not because the business brought in much more margin. The segment’s adjusted operating margin (the share of gross profit kept as operating profit) rose 4.9 percentage points to 32.3%.

The Loadstar is careful to note these figures cover an earlier stage of automation and don’t isolate AI’s contribution. We agree that other factors are likely at work. But the direction is clear, and it matches what the company says it is building.

Chief strategy and innovation officer Arun Rajan framed the goal plainly. The company says its agents draw on 100 trillion data points and a team of 450 in-house software engineers and data scientists. Rajan said that “now we’re using those advantages to widen our competitive moat in global forwarding.”

Rivals are not standing still

C.H. Robinson is not alone. On 29 September, FreightWaves reported that Flexport launched a server that lets shippers’ own AI assistants, such as ChatGPT or Claude, track, quote and book freight on its platform at negotiated rates. Flexport says its AI agents handle 21 million tasks a year across more than 13,000 customer companies. “The future of global logistics is autonomous: intelligent supply chains that see problems before they happen,” said founder and CEO Ryan Petersen.

The two approaches differ. C.H. Robinson is using agents inside its own operation to cut the work behind each quote and booking. Flexport is opening its platform so a shipper’s software can do the asking. Both lead to the same place: the shipper’s buyer no longer waits on a person to reply.

What this means for forwarders and shippers

For mid-sized forwarders, the pressure lands on the pricing desk first. A shipper who gets an air quote in three minutes from one provider will not wait a day for another. Expect more tenders to ask about quote turnaround times.

The terminal-fee example matters too. Forwarders that still build quotes by phoning terminals across time zones are carrying a cost that large rivals are removing. Smaller firms will not build their own agents. They will buy them from software vendors.

For shippers with many suppliers, the booking change is the one to watch. If suppliers can book by plain email and still get a clean, automated booking, the old fight over portal adoption goes away. That could make it easier to move freight between forwarders, because switching no longer means retraining 50 suppliers.

There is a caution. Faster quotes are only useful if they are right. A quote built from a stale terminal fee or a misread email is a fast wrong answer. Shippers should check accuracy, not just speed, and ask how often automated quotes are revised.

For C.H. Robinson’s own staff, the numbers speak for themselves. Headcount in forwarding fell by about a sixth in a year. The booking rollout through Q1 2027 is aimed at the work that is still manual.

Our prediction

We expect C.H. Robinson’s third-quarter release on 28 October to show Global Forwarding average headcount down at least 10% year on year, with segment operating income up. We also expect the company to say the Q1 2027 global ocean booking rollout is on schedule. If headcount falls by less than 10%, or operating income falls, our “cost first” reading is wrong and we will say so.

Sources