Artificial Intelligence and predictive software
Right now, perhaps no other technology has the greater potential to be disruptive that artificial intelligence (A.I.), which crunches the collected “big data” from the supply chain and uses machine learning to identify hidden patterns of daily e-commerce.
This is the industry that practically invented the phrase “I need it shipped there yesterday,” and with the mind-bending capabilities of the latest data-driven predictive software, shippers and forwarders may soon be able to anticipate bottlenecks like weather events, traffic slowdowns and other until-now-unforeseen variables that can gum up the supply chain.
A.I. can also be used for anticipating not just potential problems, but future buying habits, so shippers can better estimate when certain products will be most popular and can react swiftly to move these commodities to distribution center closer to their customers. Alibaba’s research in machine learning has made great strides in the A.I. arena with its PAI 20. platform. Stay tuned for much more of this as the year progresses.