Three years ago because the pandemic caused chaos for large and large companies, the director of the Colgate-Palmolive supply chain, Luciano Sieber, orchestrated a “logistics blitz”.
The result gave Sieber a better understanding of how Colgate-Palmolive moves its products around the world. But he stuck Sieber with another problem: too much data.
About a year ago, Sieber says he found a solution to this problem with Uber Freight. The logistics and long -term analysis branch of the driving service has developed new ways to collapse large amounts of data using artificial intelligence. Colgate-Palmolive has become one of the first companies to use one of its new products, AA LLM Uber Freight focused on AA Insights AI logistics.
Now Uber Freight more formally launches a series of AI features to shipments around the world as part of its existing supply chain software. Which includes an expansion of the information AI, which is the freight uber Launched quietly in 2023As well as more than 30 AI agents built to “perform key logistics tasks throughout the freight life cycle”.
Uber freight is not the only one to try to danger from unruly supply chains with modern artificial intelligence tools. Flexport announced its own suite of AI tools in February, and there are a myriad of startups that try to help companies face data, reduce inventory stocks and better provide supply and demand.
But Uber Freight bet that its solutions AI can have an immediate impact on the net profit of its first -rate customers and nearly 10,000 other sender with whom it works. This is largely because of the knowledge base and the relationships it has established during the eight years since its creation To correspond to long-haul truckers with sender.
“The supply chain is intrinsically a problem rich in data. It is complex, it is nuanced and AI can play a fundamental role in shaping and accelerating it,” said Lior Ron, the founder of Uber Freight, in an interview with Techcrunch.
‘We built around this moment’
Uber Freight began as a simpler commercial brokerage model when it was launched in 2017. But the Uber subsidiary has regularly evolved over the years in addition to a service provider for companies that send goods worldwide.
Many modern companies are trying to find ways to incorporate artificial intelligence (often at Mixed results)); It is not surprising that Uber Freight puts technology at the front and center. After all, Ron’s undergraduate work and his master thesis was centered on the AI-back “in the ages of darkness, when his name was” neural networks “,” he joked.
Ron continued to work with automatic learning technology when he directed Google Maps from 2007 to 2016. It was there, he said, that he saw “the potential to digitize the physical universe”.
“This kind of self has led to the fundamental belief, nine years ago, that the supply chain is fundamentally a challenge on data, focused on technology that could be accelerated with data connectivity, and over time, AI,” he said. “We have built ourselves around this moment, I think, since I started the Uber freight.”
Ron said Uber Freight has used automatic learning in his work from the start. But it was about two years ago that the team started trying to work with more advanced AI generating capacities.
It was not an easy road, “said Ron. Uber Freight’s initial attempts to build a kind of “logistics co -pilot” have been riddled with hallucinations and have only returned precise responses from around 60% to 70% of the time.
Now that technology has been “tested in combat” and “leads to real business results”, with a 98%precision rate, according to Ron. The company claims that the AI model of AI has been formed on internal and external data linked to the $ 20 billion in freight that it helps to move each year. It also operates several unkindled AI models “offering optimal price, precision and performance combinations”, according to Uber Freight.
Ron said that this AI push creates new ways for customers to work with data related to their supply chain. They can ask Insights IA to stop quickly, for example, the least efficient points of origin for special expeditions. Or they can ask to be shown “all CVS shipments in 2023.” Ron stressed that requests can also be much more complex than that, and that the model is still standing.
Insights AI is presented to customers like other popular LLM interfaces; He will also show his work and clearly indicate where all the data come from, just like the other models of reasoning.
All this allows a customer to “win information on your network much faster, at almost 100% precision instantly, in relation to formulating what you want to know, sending it to certain analysts and waiting two weeks for the PowerPoint presentation to return to have a discussion,” said Ron.
“What do you want to know?”‘
Uber Freight works with many fortune companies 500, but she found a partner particularly disposed in Colgate-Palmolive for Trial Insights AI and its other new tools. The conglomerate already puts a series of AI models available to all its employees, according to Sieber. This also means that these workers are undergoing compulsory training on AI ethics which has been developed internally.
“I think it’s great, because it transforms the conversation of fear into” how it makes me more effective and how [do] I become a better professional and I deliver more by having access and using these new technologies, ”said Sieber.
For example, Sieber said that his company had used AI information to easily identify carriers who accept less shipping than contractually moving. From there, they can determine why these levels are low and propose a solution to bring the carrier back in accordance or drop them in favor of another.
It was previously a challenge to be resolved in real time, said Sieber, because companies like Colgate-Palmolive work with thousands of carriers. Each of these could work with different systems and workflows, and all the resulting information has never been managed centrally.
The next step with AI, said Sieber and Ron, was to find ways to create more proactive solutions. Ron said it is another place where Uber Freight can bend his data forces. “We know the facilities, we know the ways, we know the prices,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
These more proactive integrations are in the form of alerts which indicate to a client as a colgate-pale, they too paying on certain routes, or that there are faster options available for a special shipment.
Any suggestion like this can only save a few hundred, or perhaps a few thousand dollars. But aggregated on a whole network, it could make a big difference.
This is why, when asked, Sieber was quick to answer that the Colgate-Palmolive financial director is the executive who is most satisfied with what Uber Freight has allowed. “He likes to see logistical costs down,” said Sieber.
