Sharpening Its Edge: U.S. Postal Service Opens AI Apps on Edge Network

In 2019, the U.S. Postal Service had a need to identify and track items in its torrent of more than 100 million pieces of daily mail. A USPS AI architect had an idea. Ryan Simpson wanted to expand an image analysis system a postal team was developing into something much broader that could tackle this needle-in-a-haystack problem. With edge AI servers strategically located at its processing centers, he believed USPS could analyze the billions of images each center generated. The resulting insights, expressed in a few key data points, could be shared quickly over the network.