Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing the Logistics and Transportation industry in a way never seen before. In a globalized world and in continental-sized countries such as Brazil, the industry faces unique and complex challenges.
To optimize supply chain operations, such as delivery planning, you need to consider a vast number of variables that can change rapidly and that change all conditions required to meet SLA requirements. Advanced AI models can predict the behavior of these variables and help companies react in time or take actions that minimize the impact of these changes. Replanning in the logistics sector accounts for a large share of efficiency losses in the industry.
Artificial intelligence can correlate where trucks are located through georeferenced monitoring systems, predict a possible delay, and automatically optimize delivery routing.
This predictability has impacted the logistics chain of industries in different ways.
In agribusiness, for example, rain is an important trigger for various operations. The rainy season coincides with an increase in the transportation of seedlings/seeds for planting. Everyone knows that the rains make it difficult to ship out the loads and that new solutions are needed. However, if we consider water transportation, heavy rains also make it impossible to use this mode. With artificial intelligence, we can create prescriptive models (recommendation), which indicate risks associated with seasonal demands, using the geolocation of vehicles and the weather forecast, and suggest a replanning of the operation.
In the retail sector, we have seen many innovations based entirely on artificial intelligence. In fact, some retail giants have already transitioned from a “sell-to-ship” to a “ship-to-sell” model. In the “ship-to-sell” model, the retailer does not expect the customer to buy the goods to “ship.” The artificial intelligence algorithm has already analyzed millions of purchasing transactions that have been made in the past to have such a high level of certainty, but so high, that the retailer can ship the product that the customer will buy when it arrives at their home.
But the biggest impact on Logistics and Transportation is the advent of autonomous vehicles. What seemed to be a futuristic setting is now a reality. Autonomous vehicles are already in circulation in several cities around the world making short-distance, last-mile deliveries. For example, iFood recently announced testing with autonomous vehicles delivering orders within shopping malls.
Autonomous vehicles exist due to various AI components, such as prediction model, machine learning to reduce risk of accidents, computer vision, among others. The NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) has set five levels of autonomy for vehicles, where Level 4 means that the vehicle is fully autonomous, but limited in some conditions, such as snowy roads. Once the maximum levels of autonomy are achieved and all regulatory and legal aspects understood, the revolution will be complete: fully autonomous fleets will travel across all modes of transportation 24 hours a day, with very high energy efficiency, low accident numbers and with accurate forecasts of scheduled deliveries.
Obviously, every revolution has a major impact on the environment in which they occur.
In the corporate world, this means the need for important change management to assess and remedy the impact on organizations. Large automation programs based on artificial intelligence must be accompanied by employee re-skilling programs, as workers are transitioned away from the automated roles, allowing companies to leverage business knowledge in other projects.
That is artificial intelligence working towards progress, efficiency and agility in Logistics, caring for the most valuable asset that companies can have in the age of knowledge: their employees.
About auctus.ai – Augmented Intelligence
Belonging to the Innovatech Group, auctus.ai offers consulting services and develops solutions based on data science, artificial intelligence and business process automation (RPA).
The business purpose of auctus.ai is to provide customized solutions capable of reducing costs and improving the experience of our clients’ customers through the application of data science and intelligent process automation, where we automate not only repetitive tasks, but also integration between systems, using unstructured data and generating insights and predictions for making business decisions.
The solutions of auctus.ai can be applied in small to large companies, in business processes that are common to all financial, administrative, customer service, human resources and IT companies, among others.