Delivery AI should earn its authority one segment at a time
Burq CEO Salman Habib says retailers balk when AI vendors ask for full control on day one. His company's doctrine has the AI start by watching and earn its way to fully autonomous, one…
Salman Habib thinks AI vendors are asking retailers for too much, too soon. The vendors pitching them so far want full trust from day one, the Burq cofounder said, and that is why many retailers are still stuck deciding whether to use AI at all.
Burq’s software decides how each order gets delivered, choosing among the retailer’s own fleet, gig providers, parcel and LTL carriers, and drones, the role FreightWaves described in August as the last-mile decision layer. That puts its AI where a mistake reaches a customer’s door.
“If Claude or ChatGPT gets a sentence wrong, there’s no hard feeling. You tell it to fix it and then that’s pretty much it,” Habib told FreightWaves. “Us getting an order wrong, us dispatching something to the wrong carrier or to the wrong driver, is an angry customer, and that looks bad on the retailer, that looks bad on us as a company.”
Habib and cofounder Shaban Habib laid out their answer Oct. 13 in “Earned Autonomy: A Deployment Doctrine for AI in the Physical World,” the first entry in a series Burq calls Intelligence Notes. The doctrine holds that AI should start each part of a business with no authority and earn more only on evidence from live orders, with a person signing off at each step.
This story was originally published by FreightWaves. Read the full story at FreightWaves →
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