Agentic AI in Logistics

Logistics companies are moving from chatbots that answer questions to software agents that book freight, price loads and fix routine problems on their own. (ttnews.com) Transport Topics reported on April 20 that third-party logistics providers are using agentic artificial intelligence to automate workflows, support decisions and speed up operations across freight networks. C.H. Robinson said it has deployed more than 30 autonomous agents that execute millions of shipping tasks. (ttnews.com) Those tasks include pricing, order entry, appointment scheduling, freight matching, tracking, documents and invoicing, according to Transport Topics. Mark Albrecht, C.H. Robinson’s vice president of artificial intelligence and enterprise strategy, said agentic systems have pushed some automation rates past 90%. (ttnews.com) Agentic AI means software that does the work after making a decision, not just software that drafts text or summarizes data. In freight brokerage, that can mean reading a tender, generating a quote, booking capacity and updating the shipment record in seconds instead of hours or days. (ttnews.com) (chrobinson.com) The push is landing in a large market. Transport Topics’ 2025 ranking of freight brokers put C.H. Robinson at No. 1 with $11.728 billion in gross revenue, followed by J.B. Hunt at $7.097 billion, Total Quality Logistics at $6.819 billion and Echo Global Logistics at $3.7 billion. (ttnews.com) Large logistics companies told Transport Topics that nearly all respondents to its 2026 Top 100 Logistics Companies survey had already integrated some form of artificial intelligence into business processes. The most common uses were shipment visibility, freight pricing intelligence, analytics, document processing, workflow automation, route optimization and automated communications. (ttnews.com) Executives are describing the next step as “autonomous execution within guardrails,” with workers moved toward exception handling and customer-facing work instead of repetitive brokerage tasks. Transport Topics said firms still stressed human judgment and customer relationships in an industry built on trust. (ttnews.com) Software vendors are also rebuilding around that model. Project44 said on April 9 that it acquired LunaPath.ai in an all-cash deal to bring orchestration and execution agents in-house and connect them to its supply chain data graph. (ttnews.com) C.H. Robinson has tied the strategy directly to operating results. In a March 2026 investor release, the company said hundreds of AI agents were autonomously performing millions of shipping tasks across pricing, planning, routing, tracking, documents and invoicing. (investor.chrobinson.com) The practical test is whether these systems can handle the messy parts of freight — missed pickups, accessorial charges, freight classification disputes and late changes — while leaving an audit trail a shipper can trust. That is where logistics platforms are now trying to turn artificial intelligence from a helper into an operator. (ttnews.com)