C.H. Robinson’s next AI step: adding Engineer to the Planner

Last year, C. H. Robinson, whose embrace of AI helped to drive its stock up by almost by a factor of three in a little more than two years, is rolling out its next initiative with a public launch. Many of the AI enhancements that the country’s biggest brokerage has implemented in its operations are done without fanfare.

But that changed a year ago when the company announced its Lean AI Planner. At the time, Jordan Kaas, president of C. H. Robinson’s Managed Solutions group, said the Planner was a “digital teammate” that as an agentic AI solution worked behind the scenes “to manage and execute the end-to-end logistics process to facilitate better supply chain orientation.”

The next phase is being rolled out this month: the Lean AI Engineer whose value proposition is that it continually assesses and audits a supply chain to find the areas where possible problems lurk, where it is operating at less than full efficiency and where fixes can be designed and implemented.

Cracking 90% for Planner Kass, in an interview with FreightWaves to discuss the next iteration of AI in Managed Solutions, said the Planner has grown to the point where 92% of Managed Solutions’ shipments for its 4PL customers are being driven autonomously by the Planner.

“But when you think about a shipping department, it’s not just planning and execution,” Kass said. “It’s also continuous process improvement.” But he added that those improvements tended to be “episodic and periodic.” Getting noticed in a constant barrage of freight tech announcements of the newest and the best can be challenging. C. H.

Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW), by dint of its size and its success in implementing AI, the proof of which is its rising profitability against a backdrop of a shrinking workforce, inevitably gets more publicity than others. Open 24 hours a day Kass said “the groundbreaking story here, and the innovation and the transformation, is that this runs continuously.”

As Kass put it, most auditing of supply chains are a “look back” to see what worked and what failed. But the Lean AI Engineer, he said, does hold “historical data and current data at the same time, as well as the entirety of a network. That’s just something a human being can’t do.”

And with all that data, it can review what worked in the past and look forward to fixes and improvements in the future. What Kass called the “servings” coming out of the Engineer are “served up in a continuous way and a proactive way.” “You hear a lot of people waiting on a signal,” Kass said. “This isn’t waiting.

This is saying I’m going to look into the future and be programmed.” C. H. Robinson’s North American Surface Transportation (NAST) group, which houses the company’s traditional freight brokerage operations, gets most of the focus on the company.

While the Engineer and Planner tools are being rolled out in Managed Transportation, which Kass described as “a logistics department in a box,” the technologies will make their way into other parts of the business like NAST, Kass added. And it wouldn’t be just a technology dump into another part of the business.

Kass said the AI Engineer will be “continuously studying a logistics network,” and can be powered by data from other parts of C. H. Robinson that service a customer. “It can analyze their entire network and serve up solutions, but no differently than if a customer is a core carrier or shipper or we’re doing contractual business for them.”

All of them, he said, would be receiving from the Engineer “predicted proactive information” about their supply chain. What comes out of that process, Kass said, is “incredibly sticky and really drives value for our customers.” In the prepared statement released by C. H.

Robinson in conjunction with the release of Engineer, Kass described it as a “closed-loop AI system.” “It will run continuously, improve the operation it’s running and heal itself when something breaks — without an alert or a human noticing a problem first,” Kass said.

“The Lean AI Planner executes in real time while the Lean AI Engineer studies the results, identifies patterns, adapts logic and influences future decisions.” Limitations for personnel In that same statement, after praising the “talented people to manage complexity,” Kass said talent doesn’t “scale.”

But with the Engineer, Kass said, “shippers will get infinite talent and expertise, consistently applied across every shipment, regardless of who’s available in what time zone or how much their shipping volume grows or spikes. “ Kass described an example of how the system might work.

He spoke of an LTL customer for the Managed Solutions group, “and maybe we’re managing their LTL in addition to their truckload, and they had three LTL shipments Monday, Wednesday and Friday to the same destination.” The Engineer, according to Kass, can see that and in essence say to the customer, “Hey, hang on a second.

You ship three LTLs to the same destination in a week. Why don’t we ship this as a single truckload one day a