The Postal Service is rolling out artificial intelligence tools across 195 of its processing centers to give the agency greater visibility into the terabytes of data it already captures from incoming packages each day. USPS uses the algorithms to categorize packages and to troubleshoot anomalies with packages in its delivery network. AI algorithms can also cut the time to locate missing packages down from several days to a few hours. Todd Schimmel, USPS's manager of letter mail technology, oversaw the agency's partnership with NVIDIA to stand up its Edge Computing Infrastructure Program (ECIP). Each of the four edge servers that are part of the program handles 20 terabytes of package images.

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.