Alphabet's Wing division has announced that it's launching a drone delivery service in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex on April 7th. "With this service, the DFW area will be the largest metro in the world, and the first in the United States, with access to on-demand drone delivery," a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. Wing's primary launch customer is Walgreens, which will deliver health and wellness products directly to customer's homes. For that, it will use a new operational model where drones are staged at one of its own store parking lots, rather than a Wing facility. It will also be delivering ice cream from Blue Bell Creameries, Easyvet prescription pet medications (yep) and first aid kits from Texas Health.

"We can then hand that to a product team and to R&D and say, 'This is what customers are asking for--go develop a solution that we can then sell as a company,'" she says. The focus is on repeatable and scalable solutions, she emphasizes. The Atos team tries to understand a customer's needs and what their point of view is. It's "really important that we don't give our customers a point of view until after they've given us theirs," Flores says. It's key to build from that and really understand where someone is coming from for the best solutions. A unique approach of the lab is bringing in multiple stakeholders from different parts of the business.

All parts of the transportation industry are being affected by next-gen technology with the AI market in transportation estimated to grow by nearly 20 percent annually to $10.3 billion by 2030. To support a strategy to enhance its products with more data-driven and artificial intelligence/machine learning-based solutions, Dallas-based Omnitracs LLC--a leading provider of fleet management solutions to transportation and logistics companies.--has In this role, Bose--who has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence--will oversee Omnitracs' data and AI offerings and operations, helping its customers with actionable insights that support their broader business goals, according to a statement. "Omnitracs has a deep history of providing progressive technologies to the transportation and logistics industry," Bose said in a statement. "Digital transformation is reshaping the industry rapidly, and I look forward to leveraging Omnitracs' rich data securely and applying data science and AI techniques to bring new value to Omnitracs customers."