Use of AI Helped a Logistics Giant Thrive in a Downturn

 

“Dave Bozeman faced a lot of skepticism in June 2023 when he was appointed president and CEO of America's largest freight broker.

 

The former Ford Motor and Amazon.com executive took over C.H. Robinson Worldwide as it battled falling revenue and activist investors.

 

Two years on and three years into a prolonged freight slump that has pushed thousands of carriers and brokers out of business, C.H. Robinson is growing margins even as revenue declines. The company is among a growing number of large American businesses such as Walmart and Amazon.com that say they are doing more with fewer workers because of artificial intelligence.

 

C.H. Robinson reported an operating profit for the first half of this year of $393 million, an increase of $88 million from the same period last year even as gross revenue fell 8% to $8.2 billion. The Eden Prairie, Minn., company's share price is up about 28% this year and on Sept. 19 hit an all-time high of $138.

 

Bozeman attributes C.H. Robinson's success to the company's lean operating model and its growing adoption of automation and artificial intelligence, which is helping the company broker more loads with fewer workers. "We're getting much higher win rates, and we're getting a lot more opportunities to take freight because we're always on," said Bozeman.

 

The big question looming over the company now, says Jason Seidl, a senior transportation analyst at TD Cowen, is whether C.H. Robinson can build on its performance when freight volumes bounce back.

 

"They say they're building a better mousetrap to handle more business without laying on additional cost, but you can't really test that until the business comes," Seidl said.

 

C.H. Robinson is by far the nation's biggest operator by revenue in the business of matching shippers with trucks. Its global forwarding unit is one of the nation's biggest players on lucrative trans-Pacific ocean trade lanes between Asia and the U.S.

 

Bozeman was seen as an outsider by many people in the logistics industry when he was tapped to lead the 120-year-old company. "It was a lot of skepticism," he said. "I have the emails and letters to prove it."

 

C.H. Robinson at that time was laying off hundreds of workers as revenue plummeted on falling demand after the end of the pandemic-era freight surge. Activists were pushing for a different candidate for chief executive and for the company to sell its global forwarding unit.

 

Bozeman says his background and experience made him well suited to the job. He understood the industrials sector following stints at Ford and Caterpillar. He knew the importance of technology after more than five years helping build out Amazon.com's ground and air logistics network linking warehouses and distribution centers. His combined 25 years at Harley-Davidson and Caterpillar taught him how lean manufacturing can help businesses continuously improve operations.

 

Bozeman rejected the idea of selling C.H. Robinson's forwarding unit, arguing that it was core to the broker's business. His early investor calls included talk of "embedding lean practices," eliminating "productivity bottlenecks" and increasing "clock speed on decision-making and improvement efforts." After a January 2024 earnings call in which Bozeman delivered the company's 2023 financial results, the stock fell more than $10 to $73.50.

 

"From the beginning he pitched his strategy as modernizing the business operations through applying lean principles and technology," said Bascome Majors, equity research analyst at Susquehanna. "There was a lot of talk in business buzzwords, but not a lot of tangible business progress."

 

Freight brokers match cargo with space on trucks, making money on the difference between what a carrier charges and what a shipper pays. C.H. Robinson is increasingly using machine learning and generative artificial intelligence to automate tasks and to speed up response times while keeping hiring to a minimum.

 

Bozeman says the company is automating tens of thousands of rate quotes a day and using AI to generate about half of the company's carrier bookings and appointments. He says that before the adoption of AI, the company only got to about 60% of the quote requests that came in each day. Today, he says C.H. Robinson has the ability to respond to every request.

 

Executives say the technology allows them to grow the number of customer-facing roles while reducing more menial operating roles. The company ended June with 12,858 workers, down about 20% from two years earlier.

 

C.H. Robinson's fortunes began to turn in early 2024 and the company has outperformed most of its publicly traded peers in every quarter since, TD Cowen's Seidl said. C.H. Robinson's brokerage unit is the only profitable public brokerage that grew margins in the first half of this year, as margins at others such as RXO contracted, according to a TD Cowen analysis.

 

Some analysts say it was hard to pinpoint how C.H. Robinson was achieving such remarkable efficiency gains.

 

Bozeman says the company is now turning to agentic AI, a more powerful system that can make complex decisions autonomously, to further boost efficiency and productivity.

 

He said the technology is particularly suited to global forwarding. For example, a quote for a shipment from China to Charlotte, N.C., could take a worker several days because of the complexity of figuring out routes, carriers and customs paperwork. Bozeman said agentic AI can compile the same quote in about an hour.

 

The new artificial-intelligence technologies put C.H. Robinson in a strong position for when the freight market rebounds, Bozeman said, adding: "But we also say it doesn't matter. If it doesn't turn, if it's lower for longer, we're still going to win at that."

 

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Paul Berger reports for the WSJ Logistics Report” [1]

 

1. Use of AI Helped a Logistics Giant Thrive in a Downturn. Berger, Paul.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 Oct 2025: B3.