Uber Freight bets big on AI tools to grow its business

Three years ago, because the Pandemie Chaos caused for companies large and small, Colgate-Palmolive’s Chief Supply Chain officer Luciano Sieber orchestrated a ‘logistics Blitz’.

The result Sieber gave a better understanding of how Colgate-Palmolive moves its products around the world. But it held Sieber with another problem: too much data.

About a year ago, Sieber says that he found a solution to that problem with Uber Freight. The long-term logistics and analysis of the Ride-Hailing service has developed new ways to fight large amounts of data using artificial intelligence. Colgate-Palmolive became one of the first companies to use one of the latest products, AA Logistics-oriented LLM Uber Freight Calls Inisights AI.

Now Uber Freight is launching a series of AI functions to shippers around the world as part of its existing supply chain software. This includes an extension of insights AI, that Uber freight Stilled quietly in 2023Like more than 30 AI agents built to “perform important logistics tasks during the cargo living cycle.”

Uber Freight is not only trying to tame unmanageable supply chains with modern artificial intelligence tools. Flexport announced its own package of AI tools in February, and there are countless startups that try to help companies argue, reduce stock stocks and better predict supply and demand.

But Uber Freight Gambles that his AI solutions can have an immediate impact on the Bottom Line of both the Blue chip customers and the nearly 10,000 other shippers with whom it works. This is largely due to the knowledge base and relationships it has set in the eight years since it has been created To match long -term truck drivers with shippers.

“Supply Chain is inherent in a data-rich problem. It is complex, it is nuanced and AI can play a fundamental role in shaping and accelerating,” said Uber Freight founder Lior Ron in an interview with WAN.

‘We have built at the moment’

Uber Freight started as a simpler brokerage business model when it was launched in 2017. But over the years, the Uber -subsidiary company has steadily evolved into a service provider for companies that send goods all over the world.

Many modern companies try to find ways to record artificial intelligence (often to Mixed results); It should be no surprise that Uber Freight places the technology in front and in the middle. Both Ron’s not -graduated work and his master’s thesis were finally centered around AI – far back “in the dark centuries when the” neural networks “was called,” he joked.

Ron continued to work with Machine Learning technology when he carried out Google Maps from 2007 to 2016. It was there, he said, that he saw “the potential of digitizing the physical universe”. ”

“That kind of fundamental conviction, nine years ago, that the supply chain fundamental is a data five, technology-first challenge that can be accelerated with data connectivity, and over time, ai,” he said. “We were built by this moment, I think, since I started with Uber Freight.”

Ron said that Uber Freight has used machine learning in his work since the beginning. But it was about two years ago that the team started working with more advanced generative AI options.

That “has not been an easy way,” said Ron. Uber Freight’s initial attempts to build a kind of “co-pilot for logistics” were littered with hallucinations and accurate answers only about 60% to 70% of the time.

Now that the technology is “battle tested” and according to Ron with accuracy results “with an accuracy percentage of 98%stimulates. The company says that the insights AI model is trained on internal and external data with regard to the $ 20 billion of freight that also uses ai -Models” Price, precision and performance.

Ron said that this AI -Push creates new ways for customers to work with the data related to their supply chain. They can ask for insights AI to quickly attract the worst points of origin for certain shipments. Or they can ask to be shown “All shipments to CVS in 2023.” Ron emphasized that the questions can also be much more complex than this, and the model always keeps track of.

Insights AI is presented to customers, just like other popular LLM interfaces; It will also show his work and make it clear where all data comes from, just like other reasoning models.

All this lets a customer “gain insight into your network much faster, with almost 100% accuracy immediately, versus formulating what you want to know, send it to some analysts and waiting two weeks for the PowerPoint presentation to come back to get a discussion,” said Ron.

‘What do you want to know?‘

Uber Freight works with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, but it found a particularly willing partner in Colgate-Palmolive for test insights AI and his other new tools. The conglomerate already makes a series of AI models available for all its employees, according to Sieber. It also ensures that those employees follow a mandatory training about AI ethics that has been developed internally.

“I think it’s great, because it changes the conversation of fear into: ‘How that makes me more efficient and how [do] I am a better professional and deliver more by having access and using those new technologies, “said Sieber.

For example, Sieber said that his company has used Insights AI to easily identify carriers who accept fewer shipments than they are contractually obliged to move. From there they can find out why those levels are low, and either come up with a solution to bring the carrier back into line or to drop them to the benefit of someone else.

This was rather a challenge to solve in real time, Sieber said, because companies like Colgate-Palmolive work with thousands of carriers. Each of these can work with different systems and workflows, and all that resulting information was never really managed centrally.

The next step with AI, both Sieber and Ron, has found ways to create more proactive solutions. Ron said this is another place that Uber Freight can bend his data strengths. “We know the facilities, we know the lanes, we know the prices,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

These more proactive integrations come in the form of warnings that a customer such as Colgate-Palmolive tell them that they pay too much on certain routes, or that faster options are available for a certain shipment.

Such a suggestion can only save a few hundred, or maybe a few thousand dollars. But aggregated over an entire network, it can make a big difference.

That is why, when asked, Sieber quickly answered that the Chief Financial Officer of Colgate-Palmolive is the director who is most satisfied with what Uber Freight has engaged. “He likes to see the logistics costs fall,” Sieber laughed.