According to research from Bringg's 2026 Last-Mile Performance Outlook, AI adoption in routing and visibility already exceeds 70% among retail and logistics executives at companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue (Supply Chain Dive - Technology). The report surveyed 150 executives and identified routing and visibility as the most invested-in last-mile applications. However, this market consensus on where to deploy AI masks a critical gap: routing optimization is a real-time decision that inherits structural and recurrent choices made weeks or months earlier.
The underinvestment in less visible workflows compounds operational cost. The report found that 48% of billing and invoice reconciliation, 42% of carrier management, and 39% of exception handling remain largely manual (Supply Chain Dive - Technology). Despite this, only 14% of enterprise executives plan to increase investment in billing reconciliation and carrier management. Cost per delivery achieves only 36% overachievement—the lowest metric in the dataset—while routing AI already delivers 63% overachievement on on-time delivery (Supply Chain Dive - Technology). The investment mismatch creates a competitive blind spot: 68% of executives plan additional routing and planning AI investments despite routing already being the most-adopted workflow.
Commerce practitioners should reconsider where AI delivers measurable value. The report recommends AI that answers three questions: "What should we do?" (advising on capacity and carrier tradeoffs), "Are there more valuable uses of this person's time?" (automating routine tasks to redirect labor toward judgment-driven decisions), and "Why did that happen?" (providing root-cause analysis across operational data). Over half of executives (53%) expect AI to deliver major performance gains, but only 9% expect truly transformative results (Supply Chain Dive - Technology). The companies that close the investment gap by pointing AI at recurrent and structural decisions—not just real-time routing—will reduce costs and improve customer experience most effectively.