Delivery Enters the AI Era... Competition in "Accuracy" from Dispatch to Arrival Times

Baedal Minjok and Coupang Eats Use AI to Improve the Accuracy of Delivery Times and Store Locations
Bureung Uses AI to Optimize Courier Dispatch and Routes for Bundled Orders
Optimizing Delivery Networks Across Entire Regions Will Become More Important

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the delivery market is expanding rapidly. In the past, technology competition among delivery platforms focused on how quickly they could connect orders with couriers and deliver them. More recently, AI has evolved to determine not only “when an order will arrive” and “where it should be picked up,” but also “which courier should deliver it and in what order.” The basis of competition in delivery services is expanding from speed to “the accuracy of predictions and operations.”

According to delivery platform Bureung on October 19, an analysis of 17 regions where AI dispatch was introduced in July found that the average time for a courier to reach a store after receiving an assignment fell by 3.5 minutes, from 12.7 minutes to 9.2 minutes. That represents a reduction of about 30%. In Jungnang-gu, Seoul, the rate of deliveries completed within 40 minutes also improved by 9.4 percentage points after AI dispatch was introduced.

Bureung uses AI in its delivery agency business. Through its AI-based automatic dispatch system, Bureung Plus, it optimizes which couriers receive orders in real-world delivery operations and the sequence and routes they take when handling multiple orders. A Bureung representative said, “Bureung’s AI dispatch is an example of how the technology is evolving beyond simply assigning an individual order to a nearby courier to consider orders across a region alongside couriers’ movements.”

Vroong AI Dispatch

Baedal Minjok and Coupang Eats, the market’s first- and second-largest delivery platforms, are also using AI to reduce uncertainty over delivery times, distances, and dispatch decisions. Baedal Minjok uses AI to improve the accuracy of the estimated delivery times shown to customers when they place orders. It calculates estimated arrival times by analyzing various data, including delivery conditions and the characteristics of individual stores. In an analysis released by Baedal Minjok, the share of deliveries completed within the time range quoted to customers rose from 30% to 52% after AI-based delivery time predictions were introduced.

Coupang Eats is advancing the way it assigns orders to delivery partners using AI. Previously, it operated an “instant assignment” system that offered one order to a specific delivery partner. Recently, however, it has been piloting an “open assignment” system in Busan, in which multiple orders are shown to delivery partners at the same time and the system makes the final assignments. If multiple partners request the same order, the AI system makes the final assignment after considering factors such as distance and delivery conditions.

Industry observers say that as AI dispatch becomes more sophisticated, competition among delivery platforms may expand beyond how quickly they process individual orders to how efficiently they manage delivery flows across entire regions. The systems make real-time decisions about which areas are seeing a surge in orders, where there is a shortage of couriers, which couriers should receive which orders to reduce overall delays, and in what sequence to handle multiple orders to minimize travel distances. To do this, technologies that combine various types of data are important, including not only order data but also courier locations, travel routes, hourly delivery volumes, and road conditions.

A delivery industry representative said, “Going forward, AI technologies that connect diverse data in real time to optimize the entire delivery flow will become more important than simply speeding up individual stages. In particular, technologies that predict regional supply and demand and jointly optimize dispatch and routes could become a key competitive factor for delivery platforms.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.