- Amazon’s packaging has become more efficient in recent years, thanks to AI.
- The e-commerce giant built an AI model that interprets images and text to choose the best shipping materials.
- This tool is essential in helping the company eliminate 2 million tonnes of plastic and cardboard since 2015.
While most of the tech world is focused on shiny new generative AI tools, Amazon is tackling an ongoing challenge posed by modern consumerism: the proliferation of shipping materials.
For several years now, the e-commerce giant has been developing what it describes as a “multi-modal AI model” called Package Decision Engine.
The PDE’s job is to more intelligently select the appropriate box, bag or package for each of the millions of unique items sold in the company’s warehouses.
Amazon’s previous packaging strategy – chosen by less intelligent humans and computers – was often a source of confusion for customers and ridicule for the company. Frequent Amazon shoppers have almost certainly received a shipment containing a single small item in a comically sized box.
Now, instead of humans performing physical testing, the company says products are sent through a computer vision tunnel that gathers particular dimensions and characteristics (like whether they have fragile parts or whether they reside already in a box).
These images are then combined with natural language processing of the product’s textual description, along with other quantitative data to match the item with its ideal shipping solution.
While there are unexpected reasons why larger packaging is actually a smart choice, Amazon says it is committed to reducing the amount of cardboard it uses as part of its sustainability commitments.
It also makes business sense: when sending billions of packages, taking even a small amount from each one can result in incredibly high numbers.
The company estimates that using appropriately sized boxes, switching to more flexible envelopes, or skipping packaging altogether now saves 60,000 tons of cardboard per year in North America alone.
businessinsider
