At Walmart’s Chicago-area logistics operation, Leo Garcia has turned a personal understanding of life on the road into a practical experiment in artificial intelligence.
Garcia, a regional load manager who once spent more than five years behind the wheel himself, said he still thinks about the strain of long-haul schedules on drivers and their families. He described the challenge simply: keeping trucks productive while getting people home as quickly as possible.
That b...
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alance has long mattered to Walmart’s network. In 2022, the company said it had introduced onboard technology with Platform Science to cut down on manual tasks for private fleet drivers and improve visibility over daily operations. Two years later, Walmart Commerce Technologies launched Route Optimization, an AI-powered logistics product designed to trim miles, improve trailer packing and reduce inefficiencies in the middle mile. Walmart said that system had already helped avoid 30 million unnecessary miles and cut 94 million pounds of carbon emissions.
Garcia’s project aims at a more immediate problem. After taking a Google AI certification course through Walmart’s employee learning portal, and similar training in data analysis, he began building with the company’s internal coding agent, Code Puppy. The tool he created scans hundreds of available loads in the region and narrows them to a small set of the best options based on geography, timing and other operational factors.
The goal is to find a driver a profitable return load without adding hours to the journey home.
That can make a material difference. Garcia described one case in which a driver heading back to Wisconsin arrived for a scheduled pickup only to find the trailer would not be ready for three hours. Rather than leaving him waiting, the system identified another load just five miles away that was already available and heading to the same town. Another driver later collected the first trailer once it was ready.
Walmart has spent years weaving automation into its logistics network. In December 2025, the company described how its AI systems were helping orchestrate faster holiday deliveries, using forecasting, decision intelligence and real-time models to place products and choose fulfilment points more efficiently. The company has also experimented with autonomous delivery and driverless trucking in earlier pilots, underscoring how deeply automation has become embedded in its supply chain strategy.
Garcia said his own tool is still being tested for broader use, but the company can evaluate employee-built ideas and roll them out more widely if they prove useful. For him, the work is also personal. He said he could hardly have imagined, when he first entered a Walmart warehouse as a teenager, that he would one day be building software to help other drivers spend less time away from home.
Source: Noah Wire Services
