C.H. Robinson (CHRW): Hundreds of AI Agents Now Run Quote-to-Cash

C.H. Robinson (CHRW) told its 2026-07-29 earnings call that hundreds of AI agents are now embedded in its quote-to-cash workflow, and that productivity in both of its main businesses has improved by more than 60% since the end of 2022. The company did not break out how much of that gain belongs to AI [1].

C.H. Robinson is a freight forwarder that owns no trucks and no ships. It finds carriers for shippers, books capacity, clears customs and gets the freight to its destination, earning the spread between what it charges the customer and what it pays the carrier. The business is split between NAST, its North American surface transportation arm, and Global Forwarding, which handles cross-border ocean and air freight plus customs brokerage. The AI agents it built in-house take the most repetitive stretch of that business: customers send rate requests, orders and loading requirements as emails and forms; the agents read that unstructured material, quote back automatically, create the order in the system, tender the load to a carrier and book the dock appointment window under each warehouse's own rules. Each agent is trained to do one specific job, and exceptions that need judgment or a customer-specific nuance still go back to a human freight expert [1].

How the quote-to-cash AI automation evolved

Across three years this stayed one workflow that kept gaining steps and scale. Its name and its owner never changed.

On the 2023-11-01 call it did one thing: quoting. The model read the customer's quote request email, filled in the missing information and answered with a price, cutting time-to-quote from roughly 5 minutes to under 1 minute. In the last week of that quarter it generated more than 10,000 transactional quotes [2].

By mid-2024 a second step on the same workflow was quantified. The model turned customer order emails into orders inside the system, and the time to generate an order fell by more than 80% [3].

In early 2025 the scale was stated clearly for the first time and connected to output per person. The system that reads, classifies and replies to email was handling more than 10,000 transactions a day automatically. Automation of email-tendered orders rose 1,150 basis points year over year to nearly 90%. Shipments per person per day across NAST and Global Forwarding rose more than 30% over 2023 and 2024 combined [4].

That autumn, coverage widened to every step from quote to cash and to more transportation modes and customers, and the cumulative productivity gain measured off a year-end 2022 base was raised to more than 40% [5].

By 2026-07-29 the agent count was described as hundreds, and steps in Global Forwarding that had historically been manual and fragmented had been connected into the same flow [1].

What each percentage actually measures

The three headline percentages are not measuring the same thing.

The greater-than-60% productivity improvement is measured off a year-end 2022 base and covers both NAST and Global Forwarding, but the company has not published the numerator or the denominator behind it [1].

The nearly-90% automation figure covers only one channel, orders tendered by email. The company said in the same breath that other points in the order life cycle still have more runway for improvement [4].

C.H. Robinson has not disclosed how much work each agent absorbed or how many transactions get handed back to a person. Those ratios therefore cannot be converted into an amount of displaced labor cost.

Where the chain lands in the financials

The financial line this chain ends at is operating margin, and the transmission variable is people-related operating expense. A forwarder's revenue tracks freight volume; its cost tracks the human touches required to process that volume. Once agents take over quoting, order creation, tendering and appointment booking, the same volume needs fewer people, shipments per person per day rise, and labor cost per unit of volume falls.

The disclosed numbers point the same direction: Global Forwarding delivered year-over-year productivity improvement of more than 15% in the quarter and an adjusted operating margin excluding restructuring of 33.4% [1]. But that sentence credits the lean operating model, cost discipline and the AI agents together. The company has never separated out AI's own contribution, and the 33.4% figure excludes restructuring charges. What holds up here is the direction and the order of magnitude, not the attribution.

What three years confirm and what is still open

What is confirmed is an operating change: the headcount needed to move the same freight volume keeps falling, and that decoupling is now visible at the segment level. What is not separately quantified is how much of it AI itself produced.

The disclosure that would most change the reading is Global Forwarding reporting its headcount alongside its operating margin excluding restructuring in a quarter when volume grew. Volume up, headcount flat and margin still rising would be the first real test of the link between this automation and cost.

Application assessment

• Quote-to-Cash AI Automation | Business position: core operations | Adoption stage: limited production | Scope: company-wide | Value type: cost reduction

Sources

[1] Drillr - C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. (CHRW) - 2026-07-29 - earnings call

"The result has been evergreen productivity improvements of over 60% since the end of 2022 in both NAST and Global Forwarding."

[2] Drillr - C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. (CHRW) - 2023-11-01 - earnings call

"In our quoting work stream, we've utilized Gen AI to fill in the blanks where there's incomplete and unstructured information in an automated and efficient process, which has reduced the time to provide a quote from approximately 5 minutes to less than 1 minute, from the time the request is received via e-mail."

[3] Drillr - C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. (CHRW) - 2024-07-31 - earnings call

"With GenAI, we've been able to reduce the time to generate an order by more than 80%, thereby enabling us to provide faster service to customers and to effectively scale our operations when the market returns to growth."

[4] Drillr - C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. (CHRW) - 2025-01-29 - earnings call

"After utilizing Gen AI to automate orders that are tendered via e-mail, the automation of our order tenders increased 1,150 basis points compared to Q4 of last year and 440 basis points sequentially. And while the automation of this process has now reached nearly 90%, the other points in the order life cycle have more runway for improvement."

[5] Drillr - C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. (CHRW) - 2025-10-29 - earnings call

"Our ability to successfully leverage technology and automation has played a key role in our greater than 40% productivity increase since the end of 2022, and we expect to create further operating leverage as evergreen productivity improvements continue in 2025 and beyond."