Satish Natarajan is CEO and Co-Founder of DispatchTrack, a global leader in last mile delivery technology and customer experience. This article originally appeared for the Forbes Technology Council here.
Driverless trucks—powered by computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI)—can
haul freight, but they can’t provide white glove delivery service for a sectional sofa or install a new HVAC system at a job site. Given the rapid rate of change in the AI-powered technology market, we might see the latter sooner than we expect. But in the meantime, AI is poised to start impacting delivery drivers' lives in ways that you might not expect.
Even in the world of parcel delivery, we’ve started to see how
UPS is using AI to reduce porch piracy by identifying high-risk drop-off points.
Amazon is using it to help drivers more quickly identify the right parcels from the potentially disorganized pile in the back of the delivery van. When it comes to higher-touch deliveries, these innovations are just the tip of the iceberg.
AI is about to change the way that delivery drivers operate for more and more businesses, and it’s the earliest adopters who will gain the biggest competitive advantage.
How AI Can Enhance Delivery Driver Productivity
Delivery drivers are often the unsung heroes of a successful delivery. They’re the first to shoulder the blame when things go wrong, but they’re not usually singled out for praise when routes get completed successfully. That’s part of the reason you see so much chatter about replacing them altogether, while the technological advancements that make them better at their jobs are comparatively undersold.
But making drivers more productive and giving them more support to do their jobs effectively is what new advancements in AI are all about. Here are just a few of the ways that AI can potentially make life easier for drivers and enhance productivity.
- AI-powered route optimization can improve ETA accuracy, resulting in better first-attempt delivery rates and more effective capacity utilization across your fleet.
- For individual stops, mobile apps can offer AI-generated contextual overviews of what to expect, all read out by an AI-powered voice assistant.
- Generative AI can help auto-generate potential responses to messages from dispatchers and managers so that drivers can spend less time fussing with their phones and more time focusing on what matters.
- AI-powered customer-facing agents can field simple inquiries from customers (e.g., "when will the driver show up?" or "what was in my delivery order?") so that dispatchers and drivers don’t have to spend time fielding calls from customers.
In and of themselves, none of these are likely to seem revolutionary, but taken together, they start to add up. They add up to fewer disruptions and late deliveries. They add up to streamlined deliveries where drivers and other field personnel can focus their attention on what matters.
Ultimately, if they add up to one or two extra stops per day, that’s a huge win for delivery organizations.
A Day In The Life: Practical Impacts Of Contextual AI For Delivery Drivers
Let’s say you’re implementing some of the AI-powered driver capabilities that we’ve been discussing. How does that actually translate into improved productivity and cost savings?
Let’s focus on contextual stop intelligence powered by AI as a representative use case:
- The driver starts their day, and en route to the first stop, their mobile app reads out an AI-generated report on the stop they’re about to make.
- The readout tells them that they should expect to arrive in five to 10 minutes, that they’ll be doing an over-the-threshold delivery of an appliance to an apartment building with a freight elevator and that parking is scarce but a load zone is available to use in the back of the building.
- An automated message is sent out to the customer with an AI-powered ETA so they’re prepared for the driver to arrive. If they have a question about the order, they can ask an AI-powered agent and get an instant reply.
- The driver navigates the delivery easily with the contextual intelligence provided by the AI system and is back on the road within a few minutes and headed to the next stop.
From the outside, you almost wouldn’t notice the difference. But the driver is saved the trouble of multiple phone calls, and they’re able to complete the delivery just a little more quickly. Multiply this over a dozen stops per route, and the cost implications begin to add up quickly.
Bringing It All Together To Improve The Customer Delivery Experience
Cost reduction is a huge deal for delivery organizations, especially now when prices and supply chains are in flux. In the long run, the key to success is less about cost efficiency and more about customer experience: Your customers have more options than ever for getting their orders fulfilled, so it’s crucial to consistently delight them with a best-in-class delivery experience.
Whether customers will be delighted by autonomous deliveries—even after the novelty wears off—is an open question. But we already know that customers appreciate on-time deliveries and smooth delivery processes. When drivers are empowered to do the best possible job, that’s exactly what happens.
Ultimately, AI for delivery drivers will gain traction by making drivers better at their jobs. New technological advances in this area have the power to speed up all of the minutiae—loading and unloading, parking, contacting the customer—and simplify all the minute disruptions and challenges that stand between a delivery order and its successful fulfillment.
This might not have the same wow factor as a driverless van dropping off a package, but it will have more impact and greater staying power.