AI can potentially help upgrade and modernize the logistics sector
The scenes could have well been from a sci-fi movie, with ant-like robots crawling around or humanoid figures greeting visitors, but these were played out at the AI Summit in New York, held Dec.11 & 12. While the number of Indian corporate executives, AI and technology experts seemed conspicuously large, the event attracted many other international companies showcasing their highly specialized AI products and services, and their applications in various domains, including shipping/logistics, transportation, shipping documentation, etc.
Indeed, AI’s significance was also underscored by the personal appearance of New York Governor Kathy Hochul at the event, becoming, as she put it, the first New York Governor to fully support and deploy AI. Hochul, who recently announced the unveiling of an advanced university-based $16.5 million AI supercomputer at the University at Albany, powered by 24 NVIDIA DGX systems, emphasized that AI can “positively impact the world in many ways”, including its potential to prevent food insecurity. Indeed, food insecurity was an issue of major concern amid supply chain disruptions during the pandemic period.
Incedo Highlights AI’s Relevance and Practical Application to Transport
The presence of Nitin Seth, Incedo’s co-founder/CEO, added a certain luster to the company’s image; Seth has authored a popular book called “Mastering the Data Paradox”, published by Penguin Random House India.
In an interview with the American Journal of Transportation, Seth highlighted the transformative potential of data and AI – the core subject of his book. “We live in a transformative era where data and AI are redefining every aspect of our lives … this convergence holds immense promise, and the ideas discussed in this book provide a route for individuals, enterprises and nations to harness AI’s power to create a better future,” he said.
Seth, who graduated with a B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, followed by an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow, has a profound knowledge of e-Commerce.
Seth has held high positions in the corporate sector and has also served as chairman of Global Capability Center (GCC) of India’s technology-focused National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM).
Seth noted that AI was crucial in the shipping and supply chain sector. “Here are some critical factors in the industry … the first is personalization which means catering to a customer’s individual needs; secondly, automation is increasingly deployed in shipping and supply chains. Warehouse management in India, for example, is automated now and driven by robots. Automation is crucial in supply chain,” he observed.
Incedo’s CEO also referred to the tests conducted by Waymo’s driverless vehicles – autonomous vehicles (AVs) – in San Francisco, predicting a “new era of smart, sustainable mobility” powered by AI in the future. As time goes by, Waymo, a branch of Alphabet Inc., the holding company of Google, appears to be emerging as the front runner in this revolutionary movement; it is now breaking new ground with its AV testing on San Francisco’s freeways.
Indeed, driverless trucks could someday become a common feature of the goods transport delivery traffic. Would the trucking transport system not then face layoffs? “That could possibly become inevitable,” Seth replied, adding that “we will then need to find ways for creating new jobs” in various sectors, including transportation, port clearances, etc.
ABBYY’s solutions to simplify shipping documentation
At the AI summit, Texas-based ABBYY showcased Phoenix, its newest multimodal model, and other solutions that deliver precise data from documents to facilitate fuel business process automation.
Maxime Vermeir, ABBYY’s Senior Director of AI Strategy, told the American Journal of Transportation that mistakes in freight forwarding documents, for instance, can stop a shipment in its tracks, grinding operations to a halt and causing delays for the customers, besides increasing fuel and demurrage costs. “For smooth and efficient logistics, your business needs automation to deliver the right information to the right systems at the right time,” Vermeier said.
According to Vermeier, ABBYY offered “new levels of transparency to complex processes. Get precise data extraction from shipping documents, verified in real-time at every checkpoint and with every stakeholder. “AI can improve productivity and streamline business processes while improving the customer experience.” However, research at the International Chamber of Commerce and World Trade Organization suggests that just about 1% of the bulk of shipping documents are digitized, implying that the majority of companies in the global shipping markets still use paper shipping documents, enduring possible human errors, delivery delays and worse, high fees and costs. The use of AI in documentation can also contribute to operational resilience; the intelligent document process (IDP) can enhance efficiency dramatically through accurate data handling.
ABBYY highlights the case of Irish pastry supplier Portumna Pastry, whose use of the IDP solution helped CustomsTrack and Portumna Pastry automate the customs declaration process and reduce customs clearance delays in the post-Brexit period. “ABBYY helped reduce the average customs clearance time from one hour to just a few minutes,” Vermeier said.
DHL, a leading logistics service provider, did manual invoice processing, but by partnering with ABBYY, devised intelligent automation solutions, increasing productivity by 70%.
Asked whether his company’s AI solutions could help forecast a future supply-chain collapse, after the shock supply-chain disruptions of the past, Vermeier said: “We work with our customers and prepare them for such a supply-chain breakdown. With AI, one can forecast a potentially threatening future scenario.”
Kognitos’ OCR and IDP technologies for logistics sector
Kognitos, the California based company, combines the optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) with the intelligent document process (IDP) technology for preparing logistics/shipping documents.
The company works with a handful of supply-chain logistics companies, mostly engaged in land-road and sea shipping, according to Erick Pringle, Kognitos’ US Enterprise Sales.
The OCR/IDP technologies are used along with generative AI to prepare shipping documents (bill of lading, customs forms in various languages, etc.). “One of our customers was manually preparing some 15,000 BOLs a month, while another was doing 50,000 carrier bookings a month. We reduced these tasks to just minutes,” Pringle said, adding “we do not provide our services just in English but also in other languages such as Romanian, Bulgarian, Chinese, etc.”
