Uber Freight bets big on AI tools to grow its business

Three years ago, as the pandemic caused chaos for companies big and small, Colgate-Palmolive’s chief supply chain officer Luciano Sieber orchestrated a “logistics blitz.” 

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

About a year ago, Sieber says he found a solution to that problem with Uber Freight. The ride-hailing service’s long-running logistics and analytics arm has been developing new ways to wrangle large amounts of data by using artificial intelligence. Colgate-Palmolive became one of the first companies to use one of its newest products, a a logistics-focused LLM Uber Freight calls Inisights AI. 

Now, Uber Freight is more formally launching a suite of AI features to shippers around the world as part of its existing supply chain software. That includes an expansion of Insights AI, which Uber Freight quietly launched in 2023, as well as more than 30 AI agents built to “execute key logistics tasks throughout the freight lifecycle.” 

Uber Freight is not alone in trying to tame unruly supply chains with modern artificial intelligence tools. Flexport announced its own suite of AI tools in February, and there are myriad startups trying to help companies wrangle data, reduce inventory stockpiles, and better predict supply and demand.

But Uber Freight is betting its AI solutions can make an immediate impact on the bottom line of both its blue-chip customers and the nearly 10,000 other shippers it works with. That’s largely because of the knowledge base and relationships it has established in the eight years since it was created to match long-haul truckers with shippers.

“Supply chain is inherently a data-rich problem. It’s complex, it’s nuanced, and AI can serve a fundamental role in shaping it and accelerating it,” Uber Freight founder Lior Ron said in an interview with TechCrunch. 

‘We’ve been building towards this moment’

Uber Freight began as a more straightforward brokerage business model when it launched in 2017. But the Uber subsidiary has steadily evolved over the years into more of a service provider to companies that ship goods around the world. 

Many modern companies are trying to find ways to incorporate artificial intelligence (often to mixed results); it should come as no surprise that Uber Freight is putting the technology front and center. After all, both Ron’s undergraduate work and his master thesis were centered around AI – way back “in the dark ages when it was called ‘neural networks,’” he joked.

Ron continued to work with machine learning technology when he was running Google Maps from 2007 until 2016. It was there, he said, that he saw “the potential of digitizing the physical universe.” 

“That sort of led me to the foundational belief, nine years ago, that supply chain is fundamentally a data-first, technology-first challenge that could be accelerated with data connectivity, and over time, AI,” he said. “We’ve been building towards this moment, I think, since I started Uber Freight.”

Ron said Uber Freight has used machine learning in its work since the beginning. But it was around two years ago that the team started trying to work with more advanced generative AI capabilities. 

That “hasn’t been an easy road,” Ron said. Uber Freight’s initial attempts at building a sort of “co-pilot for logistics” were riddled with hallucinations and returned accurate answers only around 60% to 70% of the time.

Now that technology has been “battle tested” and is “driving real business outcomes,” with an accuracy rate of 98%, according to Ron. The company says the Insights AI model has been trained on internal and external data related to the $20 billion worth of freight that it helps move every year. It also leverages multiple undisclosed AI models “providing optimal combinations of price, precision and performance,” according to Uber Freight.

Ron said this AI push creates new ways for customers to work with the data related to their supply chain. They can ask Insights AI to quickly pull up, say, the worst-performing origin points for particular shipments. Or they can ask to be shown “all shipments to CVS in 2023.” Ron stressed that the queries can be far more complex than this, too, and the model always keeps up. 

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

All of this lets a customer “gain insights on your network much faster, at close to 100% accuracy instantly, versus formulating what you want to know, sending it to some analysts, and waiting for two weeks for the PowerPoint presentation to come back to have a discussion,” Ron said.

‘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 to trial Insights AI and its other new tools. The conglomerate already makes a suite of AI models available to all of its employees, according to Sieber. It also makes those workers take a mandatory training on AI ethics that was developed in-house.

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

For instance, Sieber said his company has used Insights AI to easily identify carriers who are accepting fewer shipments than they’re contractually obligated to to move. From there, they can work out why those levels are low, and either come up with a solution to get the carrier back in compliance or drop them in favor of another.

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

The next step with AI, both Sieber and Ron said, has been finding ways to create more proactive solutions. Ron said this is another place Uber Freight can flex its 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 alerts that tell a customer like Colgate-Palmolive they’re overpaying on certain routes, or that there are faster options available for a particular shipment. 

Any single suggestion like that may only save a few hundred, or perhaps a few thousand dollars. But aggregated over an entire network, it could make a big difference.

That’s why, when asked, Sieber was quick to answer that Colgate-Palmolive’s chief financial officer is the executive who’s most pleased with what Uber Freight’s enabled. “He loves to see logistics costs coming down,” Sieber laughed.