Inbound Logistics | July 2026

Tabulating AI Results

Where I’m Seeing Gains from AI

Physical AI Partnership Accelerates Globally Wiliot, a provider of Physical AI for

Order entry

Carrier calls

By MATT HUCKEBA , Chief Strategy O cer, Evans Transportation

supply chains, expanded its collaboration with AT&T to scale the deployment and operation of its Physical AI platform across enterprise supply chain environments. The collaboration builds on a multi- year relationship and marks a shift to a systems integration and device certication model designed to support large-scale deployments, ongoing network operations, and future data service delivery for AT&T customers. As enterprises digitize physical operations, demand is increasing for continuous, item-level visibility across complex supply chains. Wiliot’s Physical AI platform provides the sensing and intelligence layer— capturing real-time data from battery-free IoT Pixels—while AT&T delivers the network infrastructure, cellular connectivity, and eld execution needed to deploy and operate these networks at scale. Since late 2025, the companies have established a systems integration collaboration in which AT&T delivers deployment and operational capabilities across customer environments. AT&T is now supporting design, installation, asset tagging, and ongoing maintenance across active deployments, serving as a scaled execution layer for Wiliot’s platform. It is doing this across multiple enterprise environments— including leading retailers, food and beverage companies, and quick-service restaurants—with AT&T completing a signicant portion of eld deployments in the rst quarter of ramp-up. Wiliot currently works with the majority of Fortune 50 companies that have active supply chain initiatives. Its platform is now deployed across tens of

When I’m asked where AI is paying off in our supply chain, I point to two places where results show up in the service we deliver every day. Neither is a ashy bolt-on. Both came from a deliberate choice to aim AI at the highest-volume operational work, where small gains compound fast. The rst is order entry. Not long ago, each member of our team

manually keyed 100 to 120 orders every single day. Now integrations and AI agents pull shipment details from emails and PDFs and drop clean data straight into our transportation management system. Our team touches one or two orders a day, and only when something genuinely needs a human call. For our shipper partners, that means faster order-to-tender cycles and far fewer billing disputes. The carrier side has seen an even bigger shift. Over the past several months, AI agents have answered more than 100,000 inbound carrier calls. Each agent identies the carrier by MC number, conrms safety and setup status, screens out bad actors and spam, and runs an initial rate qualication against the market. Before this, we missed roughly half those calls. Today we answer nearly all of them, which means broader capacity coverage, better pricing surfaced faster, and fewer loads lost because a driver moved on. For shippers, that shows up as more reliable coverage and quotes that hold. The compounding effect is strategic and, more importantly, relational. By taking repetitive work off our team’s plates, we’ve freed our most experienced people to focus on what no algorithm replaces: the relationships and trust that keep this business moving.

Exception handling Status updates

Data entry Tools and dashboards

By MILTON FELICIANO , Vice President, Information Technology, iGPS Logistics

We’ve seen real results, but also real limitations. For repetitive tasks that used to require a dedicated person, like exception handling, status updates, and data entry, AI just does it, cleanly and consistently. That has been a genuine win. On the development side, AI code assistants have been a force multiplier. Our operations team is getting tools and dashboards

built in days instead of weeks. That speed matters when you’re running a live pallet network. But AI isn’t the answer to everything. In a smart pallet business, your edge comes from operational specicity: knowing your network, your customers, your exception patterns. AI doesn’t replace that (yet). The organizations getting real value right now are the ones who have gured out which problems AI is actually suited for, found AI partners who understand their industry to collaborate with, and had the discipline and patience to stop there.

164 Inbound Logistics • July 2026