Ocado began as a British online-only grocery retailer and became better known as a technology company that licenses its automated fulfilment system to grocers worldwide, including Kroger in the United States. Its core asset is the Ocado Smart Platform, which combines AI, robotics, and automation to fulfil online grocery orders inside large warehouses built around dense 3D storage grids.
The signature piece is what Ocado calls an AI “air traffic” control system. Rather than letting each robot navigate on its own, a central system orchestrates the whole fleet, communicating with each bot ten times per second to coordinate their movements across the grid as they retrieve product totes. The bots move at speeds of up to 4 metres per second, and Ocado says the system lets its partners pick a 50-item order in about five minutes, while running roughly 100 million optimisation calculations per second to keep delivery routing efficient.
For a general reader, Ocado is a clear illustration of AI as the coordination brain behind physical automation: the robots are the muscle, but the value comes from an AI system planning thousands of simultaneous movements without collisions or gridlock - the same orchestration challenge facing warehouses across retail and logistics.