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Innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) are promising to transform last-mile logistics, making it more efficient, predictable, and responsive to consumer needs.
Giant Eagle in early October announced an expanded partnership with Flybuy, an AI-driven location platform. The goal of their collaboration is to cut avoidable delivery driver wait times by 50% to speed delivery to customers and enable drivers to maximize their earning potential, since most gig workers are paid by the order rather than by the hour.
Giant Eagle noted that across the industry, the average wait time for grocery delivery drivers to pick up an order is less than 10 minutes, but unexpected delays can result in reorders and late delivery for the end customer. Flybuy’s technology, which pinpoints which driver is arriving for specific orders and sends alerts to its main dashboard and picking app, has been shown to reduce wait times to less than 2.5 minutes on average.
Heather Feather, senior director of strategy, e-commerce, and innovation at Giant Eagle, said in a statement, “Using Flybuy for delivery has helped lower wait times for our guests, building their confidence that their fresh groceries will be delivered quickly and reliably.”
In an article and video released last year just before Cyber Monday, Amazon cited five ways AI is being used to deliver packages faster.
The benefits cited included:
- Stocking the right products in the right locations: Deep learning and massive datasets are tapped to decide which products to stock in which quantities at which Amazon facility while coordinating inventory shipments from millions of sellers worldwide. In recent years, transformer technology has been employed to “further improve long-term forecasting of what products Amazon should stock on its shelves.”
- Fulfilling orders with mobile industrial robots: AI-enabled robots equipped with machine vision recognize, sort, and inspect the quality of hundreds of millions of diverse goods before they are packaged and loaded on delivery trucks and shipped to customers. Once an order is placed by a customer, one of Amazon’s 750,000 mobile robots at a nearby fulfillment center fetches the item and takes it to an Amazon employee, who scans, labels, and prepares the item for packaging.
- Sorting packages for fast delivery: Once items are packaged and labeled, a robot, “Robin,” helps sort packages before they get loaded in a truck, using AI-enhanced vision to understand what the objects (different-sized boxes, soft packages, and envelopes) are and how they should be optimally lifted and packaged in the truck.
- Expecting the unexpected on the road: With more than 100,000 packages arriving every day at some facilities during the holidays, AI-supported predictive technologies help Amazon “predict the unpredictable,” such as a truck arriving early or weather disruption, to make adjustments.
- Picking the best route: More than 20 machine learning models are used to determine optimal delivery routes.
Scot Hamilton, VP for last-mile delivery routing and planning technology at Amazon, said AI “is meant to be something you don’t see or feel, but it’s as critical as oxygen. When you don’t realize it’s there, that means it’s working perfectly.”
A recent survey of 110 North American transportation, logistics, and supply chain executives from AlixPartners found that 85% of respondents said reducing total cost per order is the top priority for last-mile delivery.
Among the methods shippers are using to improve performance:
- 40% shifted volume away from UPS and FedEx to other providers in the last year.
- 49% increased the spending threshold for free shipping over past 12 months.
- An increasing number of merchants are tightening return policies.
- More executives are utilizing artificial intelligence to optimize performance, although only 7% indicated they’re investing in robotics or delivery equipment like drones and unmanned delivery bots, compared to 16% in 2023.