A study in Transportation Research Procedia deserves the attention of every e-commerce and parcel logistics executive currently being pitched “AI-powered presence prediction” as the next big efficiency lever. Based on interviews with twelve senior industry practitioners, the German research team delivers a much-needed reality check on a body of mathematical modeling literature that has promised cost reductions of up to 40% by feeding customer-presence predictions into vehicle routing.
The practitioners aren’t buying it. Their core objection is simple and correct: chasing presence probabilities produces zigzagging routes, and the extra kilometers those routes rack up can easily cancel out whatever is saved by avoiding a failed drop-off. The optimization models look elegant on paper because they abstract away exactly the operational friction that determines whether a routing change is worth making at all.
Two other findings matter more than the headline. First, data privacy isn’t a footnote. It’s the load-bearing constraint. Without customer consent to share location data, there’s no prediction model to speak of, and the researchers rightly flag recipient consent as the single most critical requirement in their model. Second, and more interesting: drivers are not passive executors of an algorithm. If a routing system removes their discretion without giving them something in return (visible efficiency gains, some flexibility to override), expect quiet non-compliance, not adoption.
What the study confirms, again, is a lesson our sector keeps relearning: last-mile problems are rarely solved by adding intelligence to a single layer of the system. The paper’s own proposed fix (hybrid presence-prediction routing paired with proactive customer communication and alternative drop-off options) works precisely because it stops treating this as a pure optimization problem and starts treating it as what it is: a coordination problem between technology, customer behavior, and driver trust.
The lesson for e-commerce and LSP decision-makers: be skeptical of vendors quoting cost-savings percentages lifted straight from simulation studies. Ask instead what the system does for consent, for driver incentives, and for the customer’s ability to reroute their own parcel before the driver even sets out. That’s where the real savings, and the real adoption risk, actually sit.
Walther Ploos van Amstel.