The secrets of an unheralded AI success story

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition:

• How Fortune 500 logistics firm C.H. Robinson became an AI success story
• Apple sues OpenAI for theft of trade secrets
• Economists urge policymakers to take the threat of AI seriously
• A new method for making frontier AI models safer
• Is data the new bottleneck to AI progress?

There are a lot of Fortune 500 C-suite executives who still complain about not being able to get ROI from AI. Dave Bozeman isn’t one of them.

The CEO of C.H. Robinson Worldwide, a 120-year old logistics company headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, says the company’s use of AI has resulted in a 45% uplift in employee productivity since 2022. Its use of AI has helped the company deliver double-digit earnings-per-share growth since 2023, despite a post-COVID slump in global shipping that has seen the company’s revenues drop some 34% over the same period.

Robinson, as the company is commonly known, is primarily a freight broker, specializing in what the industry calls LCL (less-than-container load) freight. The company now deploys hundreds of AI agents across different aspects of its business. A believer in “...