Looking at how Uber Freight is using AI to redefine logistics

Artificial intelligence has become the loudest conversation in logistics, but at Uber Freight, the technology has been part of the company’s DNA from the beginning. Speaking with Supply Chain Management Review at the CSCMP EDGE conference, Steve Barber, vice president of product at Uber Freight, said the company’s evolution from a digital-first freight platform to an AI-powered ecosystem is well underway, and it’s happening faster than even the company expected.

“The good thing about Uber Freight is that we've been dealing with big transportation data for a long time,” Barber said. “We’ve got $18 billion of freight in our network … and so we’re very comfortable with the fact that our data has to be clean, it has to be solid. Our customers need their reporting, their analytics to work the way that it should.”

From chat to conversation

Uber Freight’s first step into generative AI began where many others did, with a chat interface. But the company quickly turned it into something far more powerful.

“The first place we started was the place everybody started,” Barber recalled. “We built a really cool AI-powered generative chatbot. It basically allowed an executive, a director, somebody that typically would not know where to go get the data that they need, to ask a question in plain English and get an answer back that was formatted and clean and usable.”

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