The U.S. Post Office is set to unleash AI on the mail system…

Here’s a development we probably wouldn’t expect. The U.S. Post Office (USPS) is teaming up with NVIDIA and its artificial intelligence (AI) team to improve the U.S. mail system. Great news as it really needs it.  The USPS plans to use NVIDIA’s AI hardware and deep learning software to help locate lost packages more quickly. It is deploying this AI at more than 190 mail processing centers across the country.

This is a great example of AI at the edge of networks, as opposed to AI being run from a massive, centralized data center. And this edge-based AI system promises to improve efficiency tremendously. It starts by scanning the packages and running this data through deep learning software. This enables the USPS to process package data as much as 10 times faster and more accurately than the methods previously used. And this process generates more than 20 terabytes (TB) worth of image data every single day. 

For perspective, it would take 29,960 CD-ROM discs to store 20 TB worth of data. All this data helps the AI become exponentially smarter.

And the results are well worth it. According to the USPS, it takes eight to 10 people several days to track down missing packages using its current manual process. With NVIDIA’s AI, it can locate lost packages in just a couple of hours with only one or two people involved.  So this should result in a dramatic improvement in the service we receive from the post office. Except we may not realize it. 

After all, we’ll simply be receiving our packages on time. Still, this makes perfect sense. This AI technology has existed for several years now, and NVIDIA has gotten it to the point where it’s no longer too expensive to deploy. This is just one more reason why NVIDIA is positioned to be a dominant player in the AI space for years to come.