C.H. Robinson CEO Dave Bozeman is running AI transformation on Lean principles

Bozeman’s playbook starts with time, not tools. He runs C.H. Robinson on a “three‑horizon” framework of zero to three years, three to seven, and seven‑plus years. It’s a classic approach to make sure that resource allocation and decision-making give a company enough stability to survive while investing in innovative areas of growth. “If I go from here to three or four years from now, I know the way that we onboard humans is going to look different,” he said. “They’re going to be augmented and supplemented, and they’re going to have intelligence that helps them.”

He’s also a longtime practitioner of Lean methods, saying “it’s been a game-changer for this company” and critical in its AI transformation. “People incorrectly associated it with the manufacturing floor, but Lean is a continuous improvement process that applies to anything,” Bozeman said. His team “value‑stream maps” every process to look for friction and waste, for example, and then deploys AI agents to automate tasks. “Where there were hundreds of people to track loads, do appointment scheduling and quote responses, now you have mature agents that are in there doing that work, so we’ve shifted our people to the right, and now they are going up the value stack,” he said. “You don’t simply add heads back into those old jobs later.”

That said, what has made AI work for his company is taking a people-first strategy. Bozeman doesn’t believe in looking at headcount as a measure of performance or issuing directives to cut 10% of staff or budgets. Redesigning work is a shared mission that starts at the top, with leaders who use Lean methods as an enabler, a discovery process, and an innovation driver. I spoke to him as he’d just come off a call that featured the very human “Socratic method” of questioning to discover the root of a problem. “As a CEO, I have to force multiply,” he said. “We now have an organization that knows how to interrogate the business and drive discovery, allowing people to do their own personal discovery” in understanding how their work is going to look, feel and be executed differently, knowing that “we will never get away from the human in the loop.”

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

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