Deliveries Built Around You: How Evri and Microsoft AI Team Up

 

Imagine a parcel arriving where you actually are, not where you hoped you might be when you placed the order. It could meet you outside your morning coffee shop, or at the supermarket while you’re charging your electric car.

That is the kind of service Marcus Hunter, chief technology officer at Evri, believes AI could help create: not by replacing the practical work of moving parcels, but by making it more visible, predictable, and responsive.

“Everybody talks about personalization,” Hunter says. “But we’ve never had the tools to do personalization properly before. Now we do. So, over the next few years, we will eventually be able to give individually tailored, personalized deliveries to our 25 million customers.”

Parcel delivery looks simple from the outside: a person orders something; a courier brings it to the door and the customer gets an update. In reality, Evri runs a network that flexes around peak demand, with more than 30,000 couriers delivering every day and 6,000 to 10,000 more recruited during peak periods, such as Christmas or Black Monday.

When things go wrong – damaged labels, mis-routed parcels, or customers missing the update saying the parcel was delivered to a neighbor – these “unhappy paths”, as Hunter calls them, need addressing fast.

“I know it sounds easy delivering a parcel, but there are lots of complexities in this,” he says. “If something is damaged, what are we doing about it? How can we support a great outcome? And how can we help the customer if it’s an urgent package?”

Evri has been building towards this for several years. In 2018, it moved more technology into cloud environments so it could flex capacity as demand changes. Around three-and-a-half years ago, Hunter says, it began testing AI and automation.

One early example was customer service. Instead of colleagues entering the same information into several systems, automation helps populate records, create notes and produce a summary. Hunter says that work, using Microsoft technologies to support automation in the Contact Centre, saved 500,000 hours and helped keep more service work in the UK.

Evri has also used Microsoft Power Apps to build a fleet tool tracking van size, routes, servicing and MOT dates. Hunter says it saved “hundreds of thousands of pounds” in avoided costs.

Across three years, he says Evri has saved around £34 million through automation and AI.

The longer-term vision is a service less dependent on one standard process. If customers set a preferred safe place in the Evri app, with a photo and precise location, Evri can use that information and build on successful deliveries.

“Customers can support us with more information, by highlighting their safe place, for example” Hunter says. “AI will help us communicate more clearly.”

He also sees AI, automation and robotics changing the “middle mile”, the journey from a central hub to a depot. His example is Rugby to Carlisle, a trip that might take a lorry three-and-a-half to four hours, but could take around half-an-hour by unmanned drone.

That depends on regulation, infrastructure, and testing. But Hunter believes the roadmap is clear: more choice for customers, better visibility for colleagues, and more consistent services across rural and urban areas.