AI drive at C.H. Robinson making its way to its 4PL arm, Managed Solutions

Much of the talk by C.H. Robinson CEO Dave Bozeman (NASDAQ: CHRW) in calls with analysts and other forums has focused on the impact of AI in the company’s primary business, its brokerage operations in its North America Surface Transportation (NAST) segment.  

But the company this week is announcing the adoption of an AI-driven tool, the Always-on Logistics Planner, in its 4PL offering C.H. Robinson Managed Solutions. Managed Solutions at C.H. Robinson is under the heading of All Other and Corporate in the company’s earnings report, along with such operations as Robinson Fresh, which buys and sells produce.

Managed Solutions was formally launched in 2024, though its offerings were not new. Rather, the creation of the group brought together various services C.H. Robinson already was offering, including its TMS product and other parts of a full-service 4PL.

Defining a 4PL

In an interview with FreightWaves, Jordan Kass, the president of Managed Solutions, said the Always-on tool is not an offering that needs to be purchased separately. Rather, it runs as part of the company’s tech stack that drives its 4PL services.

Kass described the various offerings that now make up Managed Solutions as having previously been a “pure play 4PL.” Asked for a definition of a 4PL, Kass said a survey of a room of logistics professionals asked for a definition “might come back with 15 different answers.”

“The reason is because customers don’t want a one-size fits all approach,” he said. “They want a tailored solution.”

But more specifically, Kass said, he described a 4PL as operating out of a technology control tower “whereby they’re working across many supply chain trading partners.”

What Kass called a “continuum” of services for Managed Solutions’ 4PL product can be as basic as the TMS products where C.H. Robinson competes with companies like Blue Yonder. But Managed Solutions also competes in what Kaas called “the other end of the spectrum” with “a full venue of services, moving up and down the continuum.”

More formally, in the company’s 10-K filing for 2025, C.H. Robinson said Managed Solutions was created “to address a growing gap in the marketplace for shippers wanting seamless access to 4PL services, 3PL, managed transportation and TMS technology from one provider.”

Not the same as automation

Kass described the Always-on tool as a “digital teammate” that will run often behind the scenes to get tasks accomplished if no human being is around.

“The work isn’t going away,” Kass said. “We’re just putting forward a digital teammate to manage and execute the end-to-end logistics process to facilitate better supply chain orientation.”

Kass described Always-on as not the same as an automation process. .“It’s not simply automating a task,” he said. “We’re focused on the entirety of the process, because our customers are dealing with more disruption than they ever have before with less resources. It is very additive to the process.”

Driving the process is agentic AI, what Kass referred to as “a fleet of agents.” 

While some of that agentic AI capabilities are being drawn from the broader work on AI that C.H. Robinson has been implementing, Kass described the Always-on tool as “unique, discrete and distinctly new.”

But the group got there in part–and will move forward–by leveraging the capabilities of the C.H. Robinson technology, Kass said. “The bigger point here is that if the brokerage group builds a capability, or our group builds a capability, because we’re all on one platform, our customers get the benefits of those capabilities,” he said.

System already has been operating

The Always-on capability is now built into the Managed Solutions system and is operating. C.H. Robinson is using this week to announce its launch, but Kass said Managed Solutions customers have been using it within their systems for about two months.

“On the 4PL side, we’ve already got 100% customer adoption,” he said. “Customers are wildly excited about it.”

Kass’ description of what the tool can do sounds similar to what other C.H. Robinson executives have been saying about their capabilities in NAST, as well as other logistics personnel in general when they discuss how AI has impacted their businesses. 

“When a customer now has a question like where is my shipment, it will be picked up by the Always-on logistic planner and that question will be answered,” Kass said. Other questions sent at all hours–with Kass making the point that there really is no such thing in Always-on as “after hours”–will be answered.

The other strength AI’s promoters like to feature is that it isn’t just performing tasks on its own. The questions that come in at “after hours” for the employees will see the “tactical execution” performed by the agentic AI tools in Always-on, “and then our logistics talent gets to do what they love to do best, which is to solve problems, save customers money and improve performance.”

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