Locus Survey Finds Reliability Overtaking Speed, Highlighting New Opportunities for AI Route Optimization

Birmingham, United Kingdom, August 7th, 2026, FinanceWire

Locus has released the findings of its Q2 2026 survey of more than 1,000 U.S. online shoppers, revealing that delivery reliability and the returns experience have become higher priorities than delivery speed for most consumers. The survey also found that many shoppers are willing to accept consolidated deliveries and flexible delivery windows, creating opportunities for retailers and logistics providers to improve routing efficiency through AI-driven route optimization.

The delivery contract quietly changed

For a decade, American e-commerce ran on a simple assumption: the fastest delivery wins the customer. New consumer research suggests that contract has quietly been rewritten. In a recent Q2 2026 survey of more than 1,000 active U.S. online shoppers conducted by Locus, the world's first Decision-Intelligent Agentic Transportation Management System (TMS), only 34 % ranked fast delivery as their top reason to choose a retailer. A combined 56 % prioritized reliable delivery or the returns experience over raw speed. Speed still sells the first order; reliability increasingly decides whether there is a second. The generational split is sharper still. Just 19 % of Boomers rank fast delivery first, against roughly 40 % of Gen Z and Millennials. A retailer promising the same aggressive window to every customer in every market is paying for speed that a large share of its buyers never asked for, while underdelivering the consistency they did.

Shoppers are handing back routing capacity

The more consequential finding for logistics teams is how much flexibility shoppers are willing to trade. The survey found 84 % of U.S. consumers order multiple items at once, 58 % would accept fewer, consolidated packages, 40 % would take one to two extra days, and 22 % would collect from a store or locker. Only 11 % rejected every alternative.

That flexibility is routing capacity hiding in plain sight. Every consolidated basket is a stop removed from a route. Every accepted extra day is slack a planner can use to build denser, cheaper routes. Most delivery networks cannot act on it, because their route optimization was engineered for a different objective: minimize miles against a fixed promise, rather than choose the most profitable promise the network can reliably keep.

From shortest path to kept promise

Acting on that shift is where AI route optimization is heading. Locus approaches routing as a feasibility problem rather than a shortest-path exercise, testing every plan against more than 250 real-world constraints, from vehicle capacity and driver certifications to delivery windows, cold-chain requirements, and building access, and generating enterprise-scale route plans in under five minutes. Planning that fast changes the operating rhythm: consolidation, added orders, and mid-day disruptions become decisions a dispatcher can take at 2 p.m. rather than an overnight batch job.

The platform runs on a Sense-Decide-Execute-Learn loop. It senses travel and service times as they actually occur by corridor and stop type, decides which changes are feasible within constraints, executes through its Dispatch Agent, which weighs whether inserting an order, batching a multi-item basket into one stop, or deferring a delivery protects the most promises at the lowest cost, and learns from every completed route so the next plan starts closer to street reality. Every automated decision is explainable and auditable, with configurable autonomy that lets enterprises choose where the system executes and where a human approves.

Enterprise Deployment Results

Siam Makro, part of CP Axtra and one of Asia's largest B2B online-to-offline wholesale retailers, replaced 37 years of manual planning with Locus's agentic routing and dispatch. Planning fell from two hours per store per day to under 30 minutes, riders moved from 10 to 15 orders per day to 18 to 20 with multi-trip routing, and logistics costs dropped 16.7 % while the network absorbed a doubling of order volume in 12 months. 

"We needed a partner who could scale with our growth, and Locus delivered. We grew from 500 to 4,000 trucks, while Locus enabled a nationwide rollout in just six months and boosted fleet efficiency by 24 %," said Sarun Pipattanapongsopon, Associate Director, Last-Mile Logistics and Supply Chain Transformation, Siam Makro.

Across more than 1.5 billion deliveries for 360+ enterprise customers in 30+ countries, Locus customers have eliminated more than 800 million miles of driving and avoided more than 17 million kilograms of CO2 emissions, the compounding effect of routing for feasibility instead of theoretical distance. The survey adds the commercial argument: 68 % of shoppers say a fast refund makes them more likely to buy again, and refunds move at the speed of the delivery and return events behind them. In a market where reliability now outweighs raw speed, the route optimization that wins is the one that treats the customer promise, not the mile, as the number to optimize.

About Locus

Locus, an INGKA Group company, backed by the world’s largest IKEA retailer, builds agentic software solutions for logistics. Its flagship, and the world’s first of its kind - is the Locus Agentic TMS, built since 2015 to automate human decisions in delivery and logistics. Each decision carries the conviction to act, drawn from real-world data, intelligent reasoning, and governed execution. While legacy TMS platforms plan but cannot act, and last-mile point solutions optimize a single leg, Locus deploys agents that decide, dispatch, and deliver within the constraints you define. Every decision is bound by 250+ real-world operational constraints and governed through six enterprise mechanisms - Explainability, Traceability, Evaluation, Autonomy Levels, Execution Sandbox, and Human-in-the-Loop - trained on 1.5 billion+ optimized deliveries. Across 300+ enterprise clients and 30+ countries, with 10 patents and 99.9% uptime, Locus delivers production-grade logistics autonomy. Autonomous, on your terms.

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