Uber Freight Insights AI: bringing the power of generative AI to enterprise shippers

Transportation performance has one of the largest impacts on overall business outcomes but is also one of its most complex functions. It relies on the seamless orchestration of a multitude of fragmented decisions and actors within an ever changing market. To make the right business-critical decisions, shippers must keep tabs on evolving trends while distilling key indicators, levers, risks, and opportunities in their network. 

It’s the kind of challenge that generative AI (Gen AI)—which is growing rapidly in sophistication and investment—was built for. 

Today, Uber Freight is unveiling a new Gen AI solution to help accelerate actionable insights and transform decision-making in logistics. Insights AI uses large language models (LLMs) to enable intuitive insights discovery and data exploration from Uber Freight’s vast store of transportation data. It can support transportation teams from very granular, tactical views to the most complex, strategic analyses.

A Gen AI tool encoded with unprecedented logistics data, insights and language

Uber Freight has partnered with 1000s of shippers over more than two decades across $18B freight under management (FUM) of transportation decisions, dynamics, and outcomes. Tapping into the industry’s most robust managed datasets, Insights AI offers shippers relevant, timely insights that are contextualized within the broader market, yet curated to their specific supply chain. 

Insights AI distills a shipper’s transportation dynamics, isolating decisions and contributing factors to surface key drivers in shipper operations in a flash. It also helps Uber Freight look ahead for shippers by referencing outcomes from similar decisions in comparable market dynamics to see the potential impact of alternative decisions.

With Insights AI, shippers can unlock a new way to explore insights on-demand using natural transportation language. It translates questions like “What are my key service drivers?” into inputs powering data science analyses. Behind the scenes, Insights AI navigates SQL, correlation analyses, regression models, and more to analyze shippers’ network variables and compare them with industry benchmarks. With the click of a button, shippers can unlock 10+ steps to parse, decide, and generate insights in combination with deterministic systems.

“By harnessing the capabilities of advanced AI, Insights AI empowers shippers with seamless and immediate access to their proprietary data as well as nuanced insights from across the industry,” said Minji Lee, Director and Head of Applied and Data Science at Uber Freight. “Built on one of the world’s largest, live transportation datasets, Insights AI will transform decision making in logistics, enhance operational efficiency and deliver benefits throughout the entire supply chain.”

Not only can Insights AI quickly and confidently generate answers for shippers, Uber Freight’s $18B FUM scale means insights and hypotheses can be quickly validated. Moreover, Uber Freight can confidently identify trends and deviations, so shippers can see around corners and know when to take action.

Answering shippers’ most pressing questions in the short-term, optimizing their entire network in the long-term

Today, the Insights AI product leverages 45 data points from tens of millions of shipments from the last two years as a starting point. Uber Freight plans to add even more details around each shipment to create a richer data set. Ultimately, this will more than double the amount of data points for each shipment by the end of 2023—in addition to adding even more shipments to the data set. 

In its first iteration, Insights AI will provide proactive, actionable insights to optimize transportation outcomes for shippers. That means monitoring, analyzing, and reporting on the highest-impact trends across the broader transportation market, Uber Freight’s shipper peer group, and shippers’ own network performance. These descriptive insights use historical data to summarize characteristics and highlight trends in a customer’s transportation network – questions around “what happened?” on any given day or week. Meanwhile, its benchmarking insights use relevant anonymized and aggregated historical data to contextualize specific outcomes compared to relevant groups, helping shippers answer the question “How am I doing?”

As Insights AI continues to advance, we will also be able to help shippers uncover and take action on the most relevant opportunities in their networks and take strategic next steps:

• Diagnostic insights use historical data to identify correlations between variables in a Customer’s transportation network, answering “Why did this happen?” questions with intuitive responses and higher confidence
• Predictive insights use historical data to showcase potential scenarios in shippers’ transportation networks, answering “What might happen in the future?” questions with relevant, forward-looking responses 
• Prescriptive insights use Uber Freight’s expansive network and historical experience to recommend the best course of action moving forward, answering “What should we do next?” questions with specialized and actionable responses

As Insights AI evolves, the breadth of capabilities will continue to expand, providing shippers with proactive, actionable insights to optimize supply chain and upstream business decisions such as inventory management and customer relationships.

“Insights AI reimagines transportation planning as a fully empowered exercise and truly represents the next generation of logistics technology,” said Raj Subbiah, Head of Product at Uber Freight. “By bringing together the power of generative AI with our deep expertise and an unparalleled transportation dataset, we’re completely transforming the way logistics decisions are made across service, cost, routing guides, planning and tracking.”

Building an AI tool to transform logistics

Uber Freight is the only transportation network with the digital footprint and freight scale (with $18B FUM) to implement AI and drive transformation at scale. And we’re just at the beginning of our journey with Gen AI. Our team is exploring different ways we can leverage LLMs in our technology to create the best possible platform for our shippers. With Gen AI, we can enable better transportation outcomes by unlocking key insights for our shippers.

Sign up to stay at the forefront of Uber Freight’s Insights AI journey, get product updates, and gain early access to the tool. Join the waitlist by visiting: uberfreight.com/solutions/insights-ai/.