The CEO of a distributor that runs its own delivery trucks should start AI with route planning, cost every branch's routes from the last 13 weeks of records the company already keeps, and have one branch plan its routes with an AI route optimization tool for the next 13 weeks before deciding on the other branches. Route planning should come first because its cost is already counted every day, so the tool can be judged against the company's own figures over one quarter.
A Federal Reserve note published April 3, 2026 puts AI adoption at 13 percent of firms in wholesale trade against about 18 percent of all U.S. firms, both averaged over the four Census Bureau business surveys leading up to year-end 2025. Each survey went to one cohort of 200,000 from a 1.2 million business sample and received about 20,000 responses on average. Both rates are firm-weighted, counting a large firm and a small one alike, and the note finds that "the largest firms have the highest adoption rates".
In weeks one to four, the COO has each branch's transportation manager pull the last 13 weeks of stops from the route sheets, driver hours from the time records and fuel from the fuel invoices. The controller turns those into a cost per stop for each branch, driver pay and fuel divided by stops. The COO then picks the tool and a trial branch with middling cost per stop. Once the IT manager has read the vendor's terms on where customer addresses and order data are kept and whether the vendor may train on them, the COO signs for that branch alone on a contract that ends with the trial. That branch's transportation manager loads its customers' addresses, delivery windows, usual minutes per stop and truck capacities into the tool.
From week five to week 17 the tool plans next-day routes at the trial branch. Those are the trial's 13 weeks. Its transportation manager loads each afternoon's orders from the order system, approves every route before dispatch, records each change, and rejects any route that would take a driver under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's short-haul exception past its limits: back at the normal work reporting location "within 14 consecutive hours" and inside "a 150 air-mile radius".
In week 18 the controller recomputes every branch's cost per stop for the trial's 13 weeks, with the tool's fee added to the trial branch, and every branch's late deliveries per stop from the customer service log for both periods. The CEO extends the tool only if, from the last 13 weeks to the trial's 13, the trial branch's cost per stop fell more, or rose less, than the other branches' combined cost per stop did, and its late deliveries per stop rose no more than theirs combined. The comparison across branches takes out seasonal swings they share. The company pays for the trial from the operations budget: the vendor's fee under that contract and the transportation manager's time. An operating partner can ask each portfolio company that runs its own trucks for its cost per stop by branch, a figure each can produce before buying any tool.
A Census Bureau working paper published in April 2026, by Bureau and University of Maryland researchers, asked which business functions firms use AI in. It was not reviewed as a Bureau publication. It drew on more than 117,000 firms surveyed November 17, 2025 to February 8, 2026, often answered by one person, "typically an owner, high-level manager, or executive". Among firms using AI, again firm-weighted, it found use in "production and supply-related functions, quality control, and distribution" relatively less common, giving as one reason that these functions may exist only in some sectors and kinds of business.
