On October 26, 2026 C.H.

On October 26, 2026 C.H. Robinson said AI agents now do work in its ocean, air and customs-brokerage operations. For U.S. Customs, an agent extracts data from more than four dozen document types arriving from shippers, carriers and government agencies while the system flags and requests missing ones; time spent fell 23% and customs brokers now concentrate on validation and compliance. Quoting agents have produced over 80,000 quotes for 3,600+ customers, cutting turnaround from 1–3 days to 2–3 minutes, and ocean-booking agents for the thousands of weekly booking requests went live in China in August, with the rest of Asia in Q4 and global availability expected in Q1 2027 — after about 10 years of earlier digitisation reached only about 5% automation of ocean and air booking requests.

Stage: production for customs document handling and quoting — a named forwarder reports measured results (23% less time; 80,000+ quotes to 3,600+ customers). Ocean booking is production in China only; Asia (Q4) and global (Q1 2027) are plans.

For trade-document-ai in logistics, this is a named operator putting document extraction and missing-document chasing into the customs workflow, with the release stating that brokers keep "critical validation and compliance steps". That is the human gate the release names; it does not describe how a broker approves or rejects an agent's extraction.

For agentic-freight-booking-quoting, the CTO's own baseline — about 5% booking automation over about 10 years of digital forms and data exchange — is the comparison the release makes; it does not give the booking automation rate the agents have reached.

The release does not give error rates, override counts or what happens when an agent extracts the wrong value.