The road to net-zero is long and cost intensive, particularly on the process side of the building materials industry. However, a quick win on this journey is often neglected: logistics and transport. In this article INFORM explores how AI can reduce costs, lower carbon emissions and enhance customer service in cement logistics. By Dr Lars Lambrecht and Karsten Horn, INFORM GmbH, Germany.

Even though Large Language Models (LLMs) – with GPT-4 as the newest and most popular representative – have attracted a lot of attention from the public lately, a whole range of technologies are now currently summarised under the term “AI”. inform has always been building algorithms and software to optimise business processes using AI and related technology, with strong roots in the advanced mathematics of operations research (OR). Based on the specific use case, the company employs appropriate methodologies according to the task at hand, including search and optimisation techniques and heuristics, supervised and unsupervised learning, or combinations of these. inform calls this “customer-centric strategy” in its Hybrid AI approach.