After three days of talk, presentations and meetings we came away from Parcel Post Expo with a head full of thoughts on new ideas and trends in the postal and parcel sector. Here’s a selection:

Artificial intelligence is making its presence felt in a number of areas. Two examples:

Delivery date prediction in last mile delivery. Particularly where carriers are handing off delivery to a third party, it can be cheaper to use AI to predict delivery date rather than use third party data.

Capacity planning in locker parcel networks. At present the key focus with parcel lockers is finding the sites to place them. But, once they’re installed focus quickly turns to optimising their use.

The UPU World Leaders Forum hosted an interesting panel discussion on women in the postal sector.

Countries are lowering VAT thresholds which has implications for the importation of low value ecommerce shipments. And increasing data and security requirements.

The consumer to consumer sector (C2C) is growing and services are adapting to meet this new demand.

Increasing variety in type and size of electric vehicle options.

Last but definitely not least…

Fewer parcel locker exhibitors than 2023 – but that doesn’t mean growth in this sector has plateaued. Far from it. There’s a lot happening. Rapid scaling up of the most successful players, off grid v on grid debates, decoupling of hardware and software and more.