CH Robinson cuts air cargo quote times from days to minutes

By Nathan Brooks

CH Robinson’s AI agents have already delivered more than 80,000 price quotes to more than 3,600 customers, according to Air Cargo News, cutting air shipment quotes from one day to two to three minutes.

That is a deployed workflow, not only a promised rollout. The agents generate and return prices without manual intervention across CH Robinson’s freight-forwarding quoting process. The company said: “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 change covers air and ocean shipments, giving the same workflow a much shorter response window on two networks with different pricing lead times. For shippers and forwarders, the practical gain is speed at the point where a price is requested; the source does not show how many of those quotes become confirmed bookings.

What changed in the quoting workflow?

The deployment has two parts: quoting and customs-document processing. On the quoting side, the AI handles the full cycle of generating and returning prices. CH Robinson describes the result as a reduction from a multi-hour or multi-day task to a matter of minutes.

The contrast with the company’s earlier technology program is clear. Chief technology officer Mike Neill said: “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.”

That comparison puts a number on more than a decade of digital booking and data-exchange work. It also makes the new claims testable: reporting provides scale, turnaround-time and processing-time figures, but no deployment start date, quote accuracy, booked-volume conversion, headcount effect or dollar saving.

Mike Short, president of global forwarding at CH Robinson, appears alongside Neill in the company’s programme announcements. The source material does not include a direct quotation from Short or quantify his role in the rollout.

How much customs work can the agents absorb?

For customs clearance, the AI splits, classifies and attaches incoming documents to individual shipments and extracts the required data. It also monitors for missing documents and requests them without human prompting. CH Robinson staff previously handled around four dozen document types manually to clear US Customs.

Air Cargo News reports that the deployment has reduced customs-processing time by 23%. That gain arrives as new trade agreements, tariffs and compliance rules make customs documentation more labor-intensive, according to the report. The technology therefore targets a growing administrative load rather than a static back-office task.

The capacity effect is more concrete than the financial one. The reported 23% reduction releases staff capacity at a forwarder operating at CH Robinson’s scale, as the source describes. CH Robinson has not disclosed a cost per clearance, a headcount reduction or a service-level target, so the program should not yet be read as a quantified margin gain.

The network consequence is shorter waiting in principle: quicker pricing can accelerate freight decisions, while automatic document handling can reduce clearance delays. The source gives no completed-shipment or route-level data, however, and does not link the deployment to an airline capacity addition. It presents an operating gain inside existing forwarding chains.

What will show whether the rollout scales?

The source places the deployment within a freight market reorganising around speed and automation. It points to TAP Air Portugal’s growing interest in cargo demand on new routes and structural changes following Lufthansa’s acquisition of a stake in the Portuguese carrier. It does not quantify the stake or connect either development directly to CH Robinson’s rollout.

For CH Robinson, the next test is whether the reported gains persist as trade rules and document volumes change. Disclosure of error rates, quote-to-booking conversion, labour hours saved and shipment-clearance times would show whether faster workflow translates into lower cost and steadier throughput; until then, the source supports a deployed quoting and customs system, not a measured network or profitability advantage.