hey techbros, how about building something truly useful for humanity: a universal parcel-tracking tool. Good use case for agentic AI: user plugs in a tracking number, one agent picks it up and funnels it to the right courier; a second agent checks on the courier site and sends results, then ...
Bing and Edge put a lot of parcel tracking smarts in a while back; for quite a while I could do most of my parcel tracking just by pasting the tracking number in as a URL
Having my own parcel nightmare right now: yes please.
Strangely this may be good use case for blockchain technology to reduce fake / cloned parcel tracking that can happen. Universal standard would be bloody helpful.
you're not the first person to say this!
a third agent picks up the result and turns it into a page that shows the user where their parcel is and its ETA. Seamless experience for the user, who ends up hating the retailer a bit less; agentic companies bill the retailers/couriers for their revenue.
The forth agent shows a % likelihood of the driver zooming straight past your door, flinging a "sorry we missed you" card out of the window as they go by!
(This suggestion brought to you by trying and failing to find out where something I ordered last week is, and by being enraged at prompted to install a bloody app I've already got installed but which doesn't give me any useful information.)
We built a prototype at DTI or BIS or whatever it was called that week. But it required an additional QR code on the label so nobody was interested. And sadly agentic AI is a security nightmare.
anyway, if any VCs/techbros want to talk to me about this frankly genius idea/genuinely good use case for agentic AI, do hit me up.
Is this the sort of thing you meant? parcelsapp.com/en/tracking/ - not sure why that has Russian text mind!
oh my goodness I did not know this exists!
I tend to either use www.17track.net/en or the play.google.com/store/apps/d... Android app.
+1 for 17Track. It's not fancy, but it works. (Except for Royal Mail just lately, but they seem to have some kind of ongoing API nasties which affect their own app as well.)
thank you!
Kind of like an "internet of parcels". Perhaps it could work by forwarding parcels when they arrive at "routers" so that the parcels find their own way through the system...
The trouble with this one is that you don't get a spectacular result as a user, just something useful and we can't have that
It could suggest further ridiculous places to leave the parcel? In your recycling bin on the day that it’s being collected or hurled over the fence into next door’s garden are so prosaic.
I was on the Royal Mail project for this back in 2015. It's unfathomably complicated !!!! Will need a digital twin cache for the parcel, an event processor for scans and updates and a secure API layer available worldwide. Ironically, might be an interesting use-case for blockchain (!!)
oh yeah, I can well imagine the complexity that would underpin this! But if we can send humans to the moon, surely we can track a few parcels???
At the risk of sounding like a repetitive bore, this is the sort of thing that the spatial web standards will, in time, enable. i.e A universe of IDs, spatial tracking, governance...
We can dream, Rob