"Our collaboration with HappyRobot illustrates how we are turning artificial intelligence into practical solutions for our operations. Building on successful pilots, we are now expanding these applications internationally to improve customer experience and support our teams. This approach reflects our ambition to deploy AI where it can deliver measurable benefits for our customers and employees."
Executive Vice President, Transformation, CMA CGM Group
Mathieu Friedberg
About CMA CGM
The CMA CGM Group is a global player in sea, land, air and logistics solutions, true to its corporate purpose: We imagine better ways to serve a world in motion. Present in 184 countries, it employs 170,000 people, including nearly 6,000 in Marseille, where its head office is located.
As the world’s third-largest shipping company, CMA CGM serves more than 420 ports across five continents with a fleet of over 700 vessels. In 2025, CMA CGM carried more than 24 million twenty-foot equivalent containers (TEUs). Its subsidiary, CEVA Logistics, one of the top five global players, operates 1,000 warehouses and handled 15 million shipments in 2025. The Group’s air division operates a fleet of cargo aircraft under the CMA CGM AIR CARGO and Air Belgium brands.
With more than 54 million customer interactions handled every year, the coordination behind CMA CGM’s operations is enormous — and growing.
Behind that scale sit a lot of conversations: booking confirmations, cargo release checks, invoice follow-ups, and sales calls to customers not yet paired with a dedicated sales representative. HappyRobot builds the AI agents now handling a growing share of that work. They operate alongside CMA CGM's own teams across sales, customer care, and finance.
Each AI agent is built specifically for CMA CGM and tuned differently depending on the geography and business unit it serves — a meaningful undertaking for a group of 170,000 employees operating worldwide.
What AI agents are accomplishing today
The engagement began with several successful pilots in sales, customer care, and finance use cases, with deployments in Europe and North America, and a planned expansion to Africa, South America, and Asia. HappyRobot’s multilingual capabilities were critical to engaging with customers across these regions.
HappyRobot's Forward Deployed Engineers worked on-site alongside CMA CGM teams throughout the partnership as embedded builders with direct knowledge of CMA CGM's operations, systems, and customers. Every AI agent was developed in close collaboration with CMA CGM: tuned to its workflows, its language requirements across geographies, and the specific nuances of how its teams and customers interact.
Early pilots had to prove themselves before CMA CGM would expand the program. They did — HappyRobot delivered production-ready deployments in as little as four weeks.
In sales, Eva is the AI agent that extends CMA CGM's proactive sales coverage to a new customer segment: businesses registered on CMA CGM's website that had never completed a booking, and existing customers not yet paired with a dedicated sales representative. Eva's pilot was designed to answer a specific question: could AI generate new business in this segment while helping sales reps engage customers more effectively?
Cargo release automation delivered significant reductions in manual back and forth for the CMA CGM team by handling inbound phone inquiries such as cargo release status, customs clearance, and shipping documentation. Over 46% of cases in the US are handled fully autonomously by AI agents today, which also triggers CMA CGM's internal systems to send customers emails with cargo release numbers, streamlining the process end to end.
The results validated the approach. Across campaigns in the UK and Senegal, Eva contacted over 4,000 customers and approximately a third moved into active shipping route discussions. The pilot demonstrated that this previously untapped segment could be meaningfully activated at scale — building the commercial case for expanding the program globally: expanding to more than 20 countries before end of year and adding new functionality, growing the target segment, and developing new use cases.
In finance, HappyRobot AI agents extend collections outreach to a broader base of outstanding accounts, contacting customers directly on unpaid invoices. The collection rate has meaningfully increased since introducing HappyRobot AI agents, recovering revenue at scale with minimal manual effort from the CMA CGM team.
ZEBOX, the innovation accelerator behind the collaboration
The collaboration between CMA CGM and HappyRobot was made possible through ZEBOX, the international innovation accelerator initiated by CMA CGM Group. HappyRobot joined the Spring 2025 cohort of the ZEBOX Acceleration Program, gaining direct access to business stakeholders across the Group.
Through this framework, HappyRobot was introduced to relevant operational teams and given the opportunity to showcase its solution on the CMA CGM stand at Viva Technology, as well as alongside ZEBOX at CES 2026. That exposure helped turn early conversations into the large-scale deployment underway today.
Scaling the partnership
The ambition extends beyond individual deployments. HappyRobot is CMA CGM Group's go-to provider for voice AI, with expansion underway into more business units. Deep integrations with internal systems and third-party providers such as NiCE will broaden the scope of what AI agents can handle. With robust auditing and evaluation built into the HappyRobot platform, the CMA CGM team can scale with confidence — knowing every AI agent meets the performance bar before it interacts with customers.