Last-mile delivery has long been viewed as a cost challenge, often accounting for around 53% of total logistics costs. But according to Bringg, the real issue now begins at the customer’s front door.
Delivery is the only part of the supply chain that consumers directly experience. They choose delivery windows, receive notifications, wait for drivers, and judge the brand based on whether the promise is kept.
Bringg’s 2026 Delivery Experience Study shows how strongly delivery affects customer behavior. Around 71% of consumers consider delivery options before checkout. Among power shoppers, who buy more than 10 times per month, more than half think about delivery before they even begin shopping.
Reliability also drives repeat purchases. 65% of consumers said they would pay more to buy again from retailers that deliver reliably. On the other hand, half of all shoppers have stopped buying from a brand because of delivery problems. Among power shoppers, that figure rises to nearly 70%.
Bringg argues that last-mile performance depends on a chain of decisions made across different time horizons. Long-term network planning, weekly capacity decisions, route planning, carrier allocation, workforce scheduling, delivery slot management, and real-time exception handling all shape what the customer experiences.
This is where AI can create value, but only when applied to specific decisions. It can help model network changes against real demand, simulate capacity scenarios, manage exceptions faster, and improve communication based on context rather than static rules.
For Bringg, the companies that succeed will not be those with the most visible AI footprint, but those that identify where decisions break down and apply the right technology at the right point in the delivery chain.
Yishay Schwerd, chief product and technology officer at Bringg, leads the engineering and product teams behind the company’s last-mile solutions for global retailers and logistics providers.
