DHL Supply Chain deepens its partnership with HappyRobot to automate routine communication across global operations

DHL Group, the world’s leading logistics provider, is accelerating its enterprise-wide AI strategy through a new partnership between its contract logistics division, DHL Supply Chain, and the AI startup HappyRobot. The collaboration marks a significant step in deploying agentic AI to streamline operational communication and enhance both customer experience and employee engagement. 

DHL Supply Chain has already successfully utilized HappyRobot’s AI agents across several regions and use cases, including appointment scheduling, driver follow-up calls, and high-priority warehouse coordination. These agents autonomously handle phone and email interactions, enabling faster, more consistent, and scalable communication. 

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Quili Peña, HappyRobot’s Head of Strategy & Operations and the lead for this strategic partnership effort, emphasized the significance of the collaboration, stating: “Working with the DHL Supply Chain leadership on this landmark initiative has been fantastic. Their teams brought clarity, urgency, and real commitment to making this a reality, and we’re grateful for the strong collaboration and excited to continue building together.”

Strategic AI Deployment Across DHL Supply Chain 

“As part of our structured and strategic approach to AI, DHL Supply Chain has been systematically identifying and validating operational use cases for generative and agentic AI technologies for over 18 months. Building on our extensive operational experience with data analytics, robotic process automation, and self-learning software tools, we are now integrating AI agents to drive greater process efficiency for customers while making operational roles more engaging and rewarding for employees by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as manual data entry, routine scheduling, and standardized communications”, Sally Miller, CIO DHL Supply Chain, explained. 

Current deployments already in use across DHL Supply Chain target hundreds of thousands of emails and millions of voice minutes annually. AI agents are supporting key workflows such as appointment scheduling, transport status calls, and high-priority warehouse coordination – helping teams manage operational communication at scale and with greater consistency. 

Yamil Mateo, HappyRobot’s Head of Product, said that close collaboration between the product and engineering teams and DHL Supply Chain’s technology departments has been crucial to designing new agentic capabilities that reflect the nuances of DHL’s operations. He remarked, “The DHL team understood very early the scale of enablement our platform brings to their organization. They were clear that they wanted a partner with state-of-the-art technology and infrastructure.”

Danny Luo, a senior engineer on the founding team, added, “To enable this transformation, we’ve created a unified AI worker orchestration layer across email, WhatsApp, and SMS, enabling omnichannel capabilities with built-in fault tolerance and recovery.” He and his team have also been working on major reliability improvements in the infrastructure to support the scale and criticality of the operational processes running on the HappyRobot deployment for DHL.

AI Agents As a New Operating Model 

These implementations have already shown measurable impact – significantly reducing manual effort, increasing responsiveness, and enabling teams to focus on more strategic tasks and exception Press release Page 2 of 3 handling. By automating high-volume communication workflows, AI agents like those from HappyRobot are helping DHL deliver faster, more customer-centric services, while improving the work experience for employees and contributing to long-term workforce retention. 

AI-Driven Impact Breakdown

  • DHL​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌ Supply Chain is moving beyond AI experiments to enterprise-wide deployment, locally embedding autonomous AI agents in global communication workflows across the entire company, from warehouses to transport coordination.
  • HappyRobot’s agentic AI is a manual replacement for the handling of phones and emails, thus enabling omnichannel communication (email, phone, WhatsApp, SMS) with fault-tolerant orchestration and autonomous workflow management.
  • The effect on productivity can already be accounted for – the manual work is lessened, response speed is improved, and the teams are allowed to focus on strategic and exception-handling tasks instead of the repetitive coordination of which they are already familiar.
  • This move is in line with DHL’s AI-for-people vision and contributes to the increase of job satisfaction and workforce retention by making operational roles more engaging rather than substituting human talent.
  • The core of the deployment is scalability, i.e., the capacity to handle hundreds of thousands of emails and millions of voice minutes annually, with further use cases being developed in other markets and business units.
  • This collaboration is a major step towards the implementation of AI as a key strategy in DHL Group, following the structured adoption of AI over the past 18+ months and being in line with the existing investments in analytics, robotics, automation, and digital supply chain ​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌visibility.

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“At DHL Supply Chain, our people are at the heart of everything we do,” said Lindsay Bridges, EVP Human Resources at DHL Supply Chain. “AI agents help us relieve our teams from repetitive, time-consuming tasks and give them space to focus on meaningful, high-value work. In today’s tight labor markets, where qualified talent is increasingly scarce, these technologies allow us to maintain – and even improve – responsiveness, customer centricity, and service consistency, while making roles more attractive and sustainable. That’s not just operational progress – it’s also a win for our people.” 

HappyRobot’s platform enables fully autonomous AI agents to interact via phone, email, and messaging, while integrating seamlessly with DHL’s internal systems. And DHL Group continues to expand its AI strategy across all divisions. Beyond current pilots, further use cases are tested.

“At HappyRobot, we envision AI workers coordinating global supply chain operations – not just moving data, but actively managing workflows,” said Pablo Palafox, CEO of HappyRobot. “Too often, people are stuck maintaining systems and inboxes, with little time to solve exceptions or improve processes. DHL recognized early on the potential of AI agents as a new operating layer – one that brings speed, visibility, and consistency to logistics. We’re proud to collaborate with such forward-thinking partners to scale this vision globally.” 

HappyRobot is an enterprise-grade platform to build, deploy, and manage an AI workforce. They work with supply chain enterprises to automate end-to-end tasks at scale, leveraging communication, document parsing, web browsing, and other models to offload complex tasks from human teams. HappyRobot enables enterprises to move faster, automate information exchange, and get real-time data visibility across the organization. Common use cases include inbound and outbound sales, shipment updates, scheduling, payment collections, recruiting, and support, working across the organization as an AI partner. 

DHL is the leading global brand in the logistics industry. Our DHL divisions offer an unrivalled portfolio of logistics services ranging from national and international parcel delivery, e-commerce shipping and fulfillment solutions, international express, road, air, and ocean transport to industrial supply chain management. With approximately 400,000 employees in more than 220 countries and territories worldwide, DHL connects people and businesses securely and reliably, enabling global sustainable trade flows. With specialized solutions for growth markets and industries including technology, life sciences and healthcare, engineering, manufacturing & energy, auto-mobility and retail, DHL is decisively positioned as “The logistics company for the world”. 

DHL is part of DHL Group. The Group generated revenues of approximately 84.2 billion euros in 2024. With sustainable business practices and a commitment to society and the environment, the Group makes a positive contribution to the world. DHL Group aims to achieve net-zero emissions logistics by 2050.

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FAQs

1. Is this a partnership to replace human workers?

No. DHL Supply Chain aims to improve the employees’ roles, not to get rid of them. AI agents are to automate those parts of the communication that are tedious and time-consuming, thus leaving employees free to engage in activities of higher value, such as customer service, problem-solving, and exception handling.

2. What kind of work do AI agents do?

Present implementations have agents doing activities which include appointment scheduling, driver follow-ups, priority warehouse coordination, transport status calls, and other high-volume outbound and inbound communications across phone, email, and messaging channels.

3. What successes has DHL achieved?

The manual workload associated with the different departmental tasks has been drastically reduced due to some of the changes made, and responsiveness and service consistency have also improved. Moreover, teams have been enabled to handle peak volumes without the need to increase their number of staff numbers.

4. Where is this initiative being implemented?

The AI agents are operative in several regions and are expanding worldwide as new use cases are being verified in the DHL Supply Chain operations.

5. Can you explain the manner in which HappyRobot collaborates with DHL’s internal systems?

Providing an enterprise-grade orchestration layer, HappyRobot connects autonomously with internal applications and communication channels of DHL; hence, it is equipped with the necessary features for reliability, security, and operational ​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌safeguards.

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