HN Explorer

AI Agents for Logistics, Pitfall?

2 points by srguarapo ↗ HN
Recently we've all seen the chart showing different industries and the amount of AI solutions being created for it in percentages. I remember that something that stood out was that the supply chain and transportation industry had less than 2%.

Now recently Happy Robot reached unicorn status and they started as AI voice agents but for almost a year now they've rebranded completely to "superintelligence" (among other similar iterations before they landed on that word). But something here doesn't line up, if agents are the future and they have the infrastructure to make all the agents from here to kingdom come, why would you pivot to "enterprise superintelligence"? More importantly, why keep trying with pure agent systems when one of the biggest startups is highlighting the importance of intelligence?

It's not only Happy Robot but also C.H Robinson, J.B Hunt and Project 44. The words on their highlights do say AI agents, but if you read about what they had to do/plan on doing, it all revolves around building a data layer/infrastructure that paves the way for AI agents. So are they building AI agents? Or are they building an infrastructure with the side benefit of agents?

5 comments

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Bhagya1111
AI agents in logistics sound promising, but the biggest challenge isn't intelligence—it's reliability. One wrong autonomous decision can disrupt an entire supply chain.
lluisantoni
This should not stop companies from doing it though, right? For instance, in autonomous cars reliability is key for human safety and we already have driverless taxis.
srguarapo
100%. The comment you replied to is most likely AI cuz of the em dash and its not stopping companies. The issue is that the gains they are getting from it are minimal, you can't fix what you can't see and only a few companies are addressing that
RGoss
My guess is infrastructure, it's often very dated for running AI locally, and that's the only way to do it that makes any sense in terms of finance and security both.
srguarapo
Youre not wrong, there are some companies running on IBM AS400s but even if you address that, you still have modern companies with software systems that dont talk to each other at all. So even if you had an AI running locally, you cant give it access to all of your data because the people dont even have it unless they click around tabs. There's companies addressing this by unifying stuff like augment or mithrilis but it will take some time