OneRail partnered with Nvidia to build an AI platform that helps retailers decide how to deliver your socks faster. The last-mile delivery company apparently looked at the current state of logistics and thought what this needs is more computational power than it took to land on the moon.
Nvidia makes graphics cards that gamers use to render explosions and crypto miners use to waste electricity. Now those same chips will determine whether your deodorant arrives Tuesday or Wednesday. The technology that powers self-driving cars and large language models has been deployed to answer the question should we use FedEx or that guy with a Honda Civic.
The press release promises faster and more efficient delivery decisions. Faster than what exactly? A spreadsheet? A guy named Derek with a clipboard? OneRail did not specify which catastrophically slow decision-making process required intervention from the company that makes the H100 chip.
Retailers have been delivering products for roughly a century without artificial intelligence. They used phones and computers and occasionally their brains. But that was before someone realized you could charge more for logistics software if you mentioned AI in the pitch deck.
The platform will help retailers make delivery decisions in real time. This implies retailers were previously making delivery decisions in fake time or maybe just guessing. Ship it north. Hope for the best. Pray to the logistics gods. Now they can consult an Nvidia-powered oracle that will tell them the same thing Derek would have said but with more electricity consumption.
The announcement contains zero information about what the AI actually does or how it differs from existing routing software with a less exciting name.
Every supply chain manager in America just got an email asking why they aren't using AI yet, and they're all drafting the same response: we already are, we just called it an algorithm.
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