Artificial intelligence recognizes damaged goods

Shipping giant Amazon relies on artificial intelligence. In the future, goods will be checked for damage by AI technology before they are shipped.

Amazon is known for its fast shipping. But where things need to be done quickly, mistakes also happen. And when a customer receives damaged goods, the frustration is usually great. The shipping giant now wants to specifically counter this – with the help of artificial intelligence.

As The Wall Street Journal reports, Amazon is currently offering the new technology in dozens of supermarkets. AI shall check items for damage before shipment. Until now, this work has been done by staff in the camps. At the same time, workers also have to meet a certain demand-per-hour target.

Employees lose time by checking goods before they are shipped. Jeremy White, director of applied sciences at Amazon Robotics, told the Wall Street Journal that the job requires knowledge and is not the employees’ primary job.

The mail-order company hopes that new AI technology will speed up the entire shipping process. It is designed to contribute to the company’s efforts to automate more implementation processes. According to Amazon, AI is three times more effective than humans at detecting damaged goods.

Amazon estimates that less than 1 in 1,000 shipments contains damaged goods — with about 8 billion packages annually, that’s still a significant amount. AI technology has already been rolled out at two so-called completion centers in the United States of America. Ten more would follow in North America and Europe.