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My brother in law works at a trucking dispatch office in Des Moines, and what he said about AI scheduling threw me
We were on the phone Saturday and he mentioned that his company started running AI to plan routes and reloads about two months ago. He said the thing that stunned him was how fast it caught a driver shortage pattern the humans had missed for a while, and it flagged it 11 days out. I had been pretty dismissive about AI in real jobs like his, mostly because I picture it as a chatbot writing emails. Now I am wondering how many other boring logistics problems are quietly getting solved this way. Has anyone here seen AI route planning actually work in a small operation, or does it only pay off at the big carriers?
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richardknight10d ago
It's the same thing that happened with spell check and then with GPS. First everyone says it's a toy and can't handle real work, then one day you look up and it's just baked into everything. The reason it looks boring is that's exactly where it works best, on stuff that repeats and has clear numbers behind it. Routing and reloads are perfect for that because you either hit the window or you don't. The shortage thing is the part that should get your attention, because that is not a chatbot trick, that is a machine seeing a pattern in data nobody had time to sit down and comb through. Small operations can use it too now since a lot of this runs as cheap software instead of something you build yourself. Your brother in law basically got a look at the future of his office, and it showed up without any announcement.
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