Artificial Intelligence in shipping industry

End of 2022 artificial intelligence reached a new level in everyday use with the release of ChatGPT from the American OpenAI development company. In a few weeks, volumes were written about the virtues and dangers of a chat bot that can also write scientific essays. In the technology industry, an AI development “arms race” has begun with the participation of the largest American and Chinese tech companies.

Obviously, companies are cautious about their AI-related investments and there is also a lot of mistrust among freight forwarders regarding the use of artificial intelligence. In the meantime, there are more and more obvious arguments for the use of artificial intelligence: modern automatisms are able to independently evaluate data available on companies’ customers, they are capable of processing inquiries received via e-mails. Based on pre-determined tariffs there are already solutions that process inquiries and prepare offers – instead of a qualified pricing manager.

AI recognizes patterns in data, predicts the occurrence of certain events, according to a summary of Bito.com. For example, a specialized application can predict expected orders of customers and in order to fulfil real orders capacity allocation can be prepared at due time.

Analytical algorithms can find out, for example, in which region a certain product is going to be ordered particularly often in future time. In this way, the transport and storage capacities may be adapted to requirements. Regularly demanded goods can be stored in a warehouse near the customer’s home before the customer orders them. This shortens the delivery time. In this case, AI competes with the experience of company managers and salespeople, who essentially make a living from being aware of the habits of their company’s customers.

Our customers who import their goods with our company in Hungary, have their products stored in our facilities and when they sell them, entrust us with packing and labelling of their products, forming shipments for B2C or B2B delivery, will soon meet various AI applications at logMASter, which help silently in the background to provide a proper service.

One might ask, is it worth spending a lot of money to purchase software containing artificial intelligence algorithms and the necessary hardware devices? Yet, for most of us, it is difficult to answer this question. This can certainly explain why even by the largest companies the introduction of AI is not as fast as we would assume based on propaganda about its “enormous benefits”. But these applications are also available to us and their use in the daily work of shipping and logistics industry is not in the distant future.