LUÍS MOREIRA-MATIAS
TRANSFORMING FREIGHT LOGISTICS
WITH ADVANCED MACHINE LEARNING
DR LUÍS MOREIRA-MATIAS is Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence at sennder, Europe’s leading digital freight forwarder. At sennder, Luís created sennAI: sennder’s business unit that oversees the creation (from R&D to real-world productisation) of proprietary AI technology for the road logistics industry. During his 15-year career, Luís led 50+ FTEs across 4+ organisations to develop
Can you give us an overview of the role of data ML and AI in terms of sennder’s operations? Sure. So in the past, the business model of a freight forwarder had many limitations. On one side, we had large companies that wanted to move bulk containers of goods from A to B. On the other are typically small trucking companies (90% of trucking companies in Europe have a fleet of 15 or less trucks). Because these gigantic companies and these very small companies operate with different business models, they need the broker, or the ‘freight forwarder’ to serve as a proxy. And traditionally, these brokers were contacted via analogue methods. So there’d be dozens of phone calls, emails, faxes, etc. between these big companies, the broker, and the trucking companies. It was hard work to arrange services, to evaluate the legitimacy of the trucking businesses,
award-winning ML solutions to address realworld problems in e-commerce, travel, logistics, and finance. Luís holds a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Porto, Portugal. He possesses a world-class academic track record, with publications on ML/AI fundamentals, five patents and multiple keynotes worldwide.
and also complex from the admin side of giving feedback, receiving invoices and so on. So what sennder did was to digitalise all this into one marketplace. This brings transparency and significantly improves the customer experience on both sides. These large companies with cargo they need transporting, approach us and advertise a service request on the platform. The small truck companies on the other side can log in to the marketplace and bid, or simply take one of the services available. One problem we encountered when going digital was how to manage the volume of bids we were receiving (we have 7,000-10,000 loads every day). So we introduced predictive pricing and enabled a ‘one button sell’, meaning we can create an optimal price for everyone involved: we can guarantee we have a brokerage margin,
12 | THE DATA SCIENTIST
