AI adoption in last-mile delivery has concentrated heavily on routing and visibility, with adoption already sitting above 70% according to Bringg research in the 2026 Last-Mile Performance Outlook (Supply Chain Dive - Technology). The report surveyed 150 retail and logistics executives at companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and found that routing and visibility are the most invested-in applications in last-mile delivery. Yet almost three out of four executives (68%) plan to make additional investments in routing and planning AI despite already being the most-adopted workflows (Supply Chain Dive - Technology).
The investment mismatch reflects an AI blind spot: routing produces dashboards and surfaces in operational reviews, making it easy to demonstrate to leadership, while mission-critical back-office workflows remain largely manual. The report found that 48% of billing and invoice reconciliation, 42% of carrier management, and 39% of exception handling are still largely manual (Supply Chain Dive - Technology). These workflows are where operational cost compounds and where people spend time on tasks that don't improve customer experience. Cost per delivery sits at only 36% overachievement, the lowest figure in the dataset, yet only about 14% of enterprise executives plan to increase investment in billing reconciliation and carrier management (Supply Chain Dive - Technology).
For commerce practitioners, the competitive gap lies in addressing recurrent and structural decisions—carrier allocation, capacity planning, and invoice reconciliation—that determine cost and operational efficiency but remain largely outside the scope of routing AI. Over half (53%) of executives expect AI to deliver major performance gains, with only 9% expecting it to be truly transformative (Supply Chain Dive - Technology). Companies that redirect AI investment toward the decisions that meaningfully reduce costs and improve front-door experiences will capture the competitive advantage that most organizations don't yet recognize.