- Amazon’s packaging operations have become more efficient in recent years thanks to AI.
- The e-commerce giant has built an AI model that interprets images and text to select the best shipping materials.
- The tool has played a key role in helping the company reduce 2 million tons of plastic and cardboard since 2015.
While most of the tech industry is focused on shiny new generative AI tools, Amazon is chipping away at an ongoing challenge posed by modern consumerism: the proliferation of shipping materials.
Over the past few years, the e-commerce giant has been developing what it calls a “multimodal AI model” called the Package Decision Engine.
The PDE’s job is to do the judicious job of selecting the appropriate box, bag, or wrapper for each of the millions of unique products sold through the company’s warehouses.
Amazon’s early packaging strategies, chosen by humans and less intelligent computers, often caused customer confusion and ridicule of the company. If you shop frequently on Amazon, you’ve almost certainly received a package that contained a single small item in a ludicrously large box.
Now, the company says, instead of humans performing physical tests, products run computer vision tunnels that collect dimensions and certain characteristics, such as whether they contain fragile parts or are already in the box. It is said that they are being sent through this route.
These images are matched with natural language processing of the product’s text-based description, as well as other quantitative data to match the product with its ideal shipping solution.
There are some unexpected reasons why larger packaging is actually a smart choice, but Amazon says it’s committed to reducing the amount of cardboard it uses as part of its sustainability pledge. states.
This also makes good business sense. When you’re sending billions of packages, the small amounts from each package can add up to surprisingly large numbers.
The company estimates it can save 60,000 tons of cardboard annually in North America alone by using the correct size boxes, switching to softer envelopes, or eliminating packaging altogether.
