Topics: Carrier Newsletter, AI (Artificial Intelligence), Autonomous Vehicles, Dashcams, Robotics
More and more transportation and logistics companies are employing artificial intelligence (AI) to try and stay ahead of the competition. Cass Information Systems also can help carriers stay ahead of the competition, and we’re staying up to date on the latest trends in AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles, dashcams, and more.
C.H. Robinson Using AI to ‘Drive Value’
C.H. Robinson Worldwide credited its growing use of AI to streamline its shipping fulfillment process with a $657.4 million year-over-year improvement when announcing its first-quarter results. Meanwhile, operating expenses decreased 6.5% year over year and personnel costs dropped 8.1%.
C.H. Robinson has “some of the best logisticians in the world,” President and CEO David Bozeman told Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Lee Klaskow on his “Talking Transports” podcast in June, but “you’re not maximizing their talents if they’re doing manual, menial tasks every day. For the most part, that’s what they were doing. So we saw a huge opportunity in driving our large language models and generative AI to take away those manual tasks.”
Freight quotes, for example, are now generated within 90 seconds 24/7. “It now takes away those manual tasks and allows our people to do what they’re known for, and that is solving problems, helping customers solve their very hard problems, and really drive value into their business,” Bozeman said.
C.H. Robinson said it has been using AI for more than a decade, beginning with freight matching and continuing with supply chain insights, optimization, and visibility.
Jordan Kass, president of C.H. Robinson Managed Solutions, explained that now “AI agents plan, reason, and execute according to given goals, allowing execution of complex workflows. These agents can tackle business processes that once seemed impossible to automate.”
C.H. Robinson said in April that it had already automated more than 3 million shipping tasks with its fleet of generative AI agents — proprietary tech tools it built in 2024 to automate steps throughout the life cycle of a shipment.
“This transformative technology empowers logistics leaders to rethink the commercial solutions we deliver to the marketplace,” Kass said. “With these innovations in hand, we are transforming into a bold era of logistics. New technology, paired with the lessons of the past, provides a pathway to rethink commercial solutions addressing logistics challenges.”
AI Helps Amazon Deliver Faster, Robots Understand Commands
Amazon announced in June that it had used AI to improve its demand forecasting and delivery mapping capabilities — thus accelerating fulfillment and delivery processes. It also formed an agentic AI team to build a framework for warehouse robots to understand natural language commands.
“While these systems work behind the scenes, customers will certainly experience their benefits: more accurate delivery locations, faster shipping options, and improved availability of the products they want, when they want them,” Amazon said.
Amazon also has opened a 2.8 million-square-foot robotics fulfillment center in Charlton, Massachusetts. The hundreds of robots at the facility, which has about 32 million items in stock, each can lift up to 1,500 pounds.
Additional robotics fulfillment centers are under construction in Virginia and North Carolina. Amazon’s robots vary in size and function. Tipper, for example, transfers packages from carts to conveyor belts. A picker called Vulcan is equipped with a sense of touch.
Kodiak Partners With Roush for Autonomous Truck Technology
Kodiak Robotics has partnered with Roush Industries to enable its trucks to drive autonomously.
“Unlike traditional factory-line integration, which is limited to a single configuration, we believe that working with Roush will allow us to move faster and customize vehicles to meet customer needs,” Kodiak CEO Don Burnette said in the June announcement.
Trucking Dive reported that a Roush facility in Livonia, Michigan, has space for multiple trucks to be worked on at the same time and will help Kodiak meet its goal of building tens of trucks this year and hundreds of trucks next year before scaling further.
According to Trucking Dive, the Roush-upfitted trucks will be delivered to Kodiak’s first customer, Atlas Energy Solutions.
H-E-B Pilots Autonomous Vehicle Grocery Delivery
Grocer H-E-B is piloting deliveries by robotic vehicles at a store in Austin, Texas. Customers living within a mile of the H-E-B store can have up to 10 small items delivered by the bots between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. daily.
H-E-B partnered with Austin-based autonomous vehicle maker Avride for the pilot. Avride said its delivery robots can carry six 16.5-inch pizzas and five 1.5-liter bottles. The bots can travel up to 5 miles per hour and cover 31 miles on a single charge.
The orders are facilitated through Favor, H-E-B’s delivery app offering groceries, restaurant meals, alcohol, and household goods.
Whole Foods Supplier Cyberattack Disrupts Supply Chain
United Natural Foods Inc. (UNFI) was hit with a cyberattack in early June that forced it to shut down its systems and suspend deliveries to more than 30,000 grocery stores. UNFI, North America’s largest publicly traded wholesale grocery distributor and the primary supplier for Whole Foods Market, was still operating on a limited basis two weeks after the attack, according to a Forbes article.
When the company detected unauthorized activity on its systems, it activated an incident response plan and took portions of its network offline.
“The outage was swift and severe,” Forbes reported. “Automated systems for ordering and inventory went dark, forcing cancellations of employee shifts and a return to manual processes. Business operations were impacted across the board, resulting in significant delivery delays.”
Cyber experts agreed the attack was most likely a ransomware attack because of the resulting system shutdown, containment procedures, and prolonged disruption.
Nussbaum Installing Dashcams in All 600 Trucks
Nussbaum Transportation said it will install dashcams in all of its 600 trucks by the end of the year.
The Lytx DriveCam Event Recorders are powered by AI and are designed to identify “high-impact driving behaviors” and then coach truck drivers with customized notifications to help them correct unsafe behaviors.
The dashcams also are equipped with a weather hazard alerts feature that “uses geospatial technologies, localized weather warnings, video data, and AI to enable navigating through inclement weather without compromising operational efficiency,” the announcement said.
Nussbaum will address driver privacy concerns by controlling dashcam settings, including when and where audio is recorded and giving drivers warning alerts before video recording begins.
Truckers See Less Business as LA Port Volumes Slow
As import volumes ebb and flow with tariff implementations and pullbacks, so does the business for truckers that serve the Port of Los Angeles.
“If you’re a trucker who was hauling four or five containers a day prior to these [tariff] announcements back in April, today you’re likely hauling two or three loads,” Gene Seroka, the Port of LA’s executive director, said during a media briefing in mid-June.
Container volumes at the Port of LA were down 5% in May year over year and 19% month over month.
“The San Pedro Bay Port Complex serves as the gateway for 40% of the nation’s imports. Less goods coming to the ports means less truck drivers on the road,” the California Trucking Association told Trucking Dive.
The Port of LA had expected the import season to peak in July with goods for the year-end holidays, but Seroka isn’t sure how 2025 will shape up.
“Retailers are not telling me that they’re boosting inventory levels to have wide selections on products, beginning that Thanksgiving week and running to the end of the year,” Seroka said.
Private Equity Firms Reportedly Eyeing Forward Air Takeover
Sources told Reuters that Blackstone and Apollo Global Management are among the private equity firms interested in acquiring LTL carrier Forward Air.
Shares in Forward Air have plummeted from $121 in late 2021 to about $20 as a result of its embattled acquisition of freight forwarder Omni Logistics. Investors reportedly began pressuring Forward Air to review its business after the Omni acquisition was finalized in early 2024.
Three longtime Forward Air board directors resigned in June following pressure from activist investor Ancora Holdings.
Ryder CEO Credits Ice Cream for His Way of Thinking
Ryder System CEO Robert Sanchez learned to innovate by combining existing capabilities in new ways to solve customers’ problems as a teenager serving ice cream at a Carvel store in Miami.
The store owner fulfilled customer demand by creating his own mamey ice cream, a favorite of Cuban immigrants but not a Carvel offering.
“This guy, it’s not like he split the atom, but he invented Carvel mamey ice cream by putting these two things together and giving the customers what they wanted,” Sanchez told Fortune. “We at Ryder keep selling vanilla and chocolate, but maybe there are customers that want something different.”
By focusing on what customers wanted, Ryder, under Sanchez, has launched an e-commerce fulfillment business, a mobile maintenance offering, and technology to track freight.
“We now have a muscle for developing new products and services and innovating,” Sanchez said.
Railroad Lawsuit Pushes Nortia Logistics to Bankruptcy
Nortia Logistics, which was sued by Union Pacific in May for allegedly defaulting on a $3.6 million promissory note, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June.
Trucking Dive reported that the Chicago-area transportation company also owes more than $1.3 million in lease terminations. Liabilities total nearly $5.8 million.
According to the Union Pacific lawsuit, Nortia was on a repayment schedule, but missed monthly payments in the fourth quarter of 2024 totaling more than $499,000 and still owes $3.2 million.
Nortia reportedly had revenue of $40 million 2023 and about $29.5 million in 2024.
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