Manifest 2026: The Lean AI supply chain revolution

Hi, everybody.

Welcome. This is Smarter. Faster. Better.
The Lean AI Supply Chain Revolution with C.H. Robinson.

We’re going to spend the next 30 minutes or so talking a little bit about what’s been going on at C.H. Robinson.

Apparently, you’re all very interested, and we are super excited to share what we’ve been working on.

So let’s go ahead and jump in.

Before we do, if you want to stay connected with C.H. Robinson and what we’ve got going on, double‑click the button on the back of your name tag and that will pass us your information.

We’ll also share our booth information at the end so you’ll be able to stay connected with all the great things we’re working on.

I’m Cody Griggs.
I’m the Vice President of Digital Brokerage here at C.H. Robinson.

I’m joined on stage by Chris Cutshaw,
the Vice President of Market Solutions.

Between us, we have almost 40 years of experience at C.H. Robinson.

We’ve really been in the trenches, especially over the last few years, working on building what we have going on at C.H. Robinson, talking with customers, carriers, other brokers, and people across our industry.

We’re excited to share what Lean AI is and some of the real‑life applications we’ve been working on.

None of these words should be a surprise to many of you. You all make a living in supply chain, and you’re all interested in how we solve what’s ahead of us.

We know there’s a lot of volatility and complexity in supply chains. We’ve been living that over the last couple of years, and it continues to change every year.

We’re all being asked to do more with less. It’s been a really challenging financial environment for all of us, including our customers, and we’ve been thinking about how we help solve those problems.

And we need to do it faster and cheaper all the time.

We’re going to talk about how we’ve changed the way we work internally, as well as how we’ve leveraged AI to help solve many of those challenges.

As I mentioned, C.H. Robinson has been around for a little over 120 years. We’ve seen a lot, and we’ve solved a lot of customer problems.

What we recognized a few years ago was that if we were going to survive and thrive in a changing macroeconomic environment—and in the changing environment brokers find themselves in—we needed to change how we worked.

So we chose to disrupt from within.

We were in a unique position to do that because of our scale, our connectivity with customers, the data advantage we have, and our deep history of expertise. We employ many incredibly smart people who understand customer supply chains better than anyone else.

That put us in a position to use all of that information, data, and connectivity to our advantage and solve customer supply chains better using AI.

So let’s talk a little bit about Lean AI.

We started by asking, what is Lean AI? We’re going to share more about that.

If you’ve heard or read anything coming out of C.H. Robinson recently, you know that AI provides an immense opportunity for supply chains. Things are going to be different tomorrow than they are today.

We’re all being challenged with how to use that to our advantage.

We knew that simply plugging AI and technology into the way we were already working wasn’t going to cut it. We had tried that. It wasn’t changing fast enough, and it wasn’t producing the results we needed.

So we take our human expertise and augment it with AI. We don’t replace our people. We give them tools and a fleet of agents we’ve built to grow their business and remove some of the more menial tasks.

Chris has a demo coming up that shows what’s in production today—things that are actively working to solve this problem by combining what our people do best with AI.

When you combine people and AI with lean principles—and if you’ve heard our CEO Dave Bozeman speak, he comes from a lean manufacturing background—we’ve been applying those principles to a services model, which is very different from how we managed work in the past.

That includes scorecards, problem solving, and root‑cause analysis. It’s a clear methodology for prioritizing what to work on and answering the question: is this working or not?

That, combined with human expertise, AI, and our scale, gives us an immense opportunity to see supply‑chain scenarios as they occur, respond more quickly, and change how we react.

We’re moving more shipments in a day than many organizations move in a week. That means we see countless permutations of what’s possible and can respond very quickly.

I talked about our scale and shipment volume, but what that really allows us to do is be smarter.

This is real life. This isn’t theory or something we might do someday. This is happening today. We’re seeing results every day, and we’re evolving our approach every day.

Your AI play is here.

AI works best when fueled by rich, connected data at scale. Only C.H. Robinson offers a Lean AI advantage that works across your entire supply chain and is backed by unrivaled scale to help you predict more, move faster, and waste less.

Take control with dynamic, AI‑backed planning tools. Identify network optimization opportunities, save costs with optimal rate recommendations, and more.

Rest assured, we proactively match your freight.