The U.S. Postal Service is looking to adopt generative artificial intelligence tools in the coming months to improve customer experience and service delivery, an agency official said during a keynote session at the Salesforce World Tour D.C. event on Wednesday
Marc McCrery — vice president for customer experience at USPS — said that, coming out of the COVID pandemic, the agency was receiving up to 100 million calls and 13 million service requests.
While he said the agency’s customer operations were “extremely efficient” at handling that influx of outreach, he said one concern was that the agency “hadn’t even come close to tapping the value of that data.”
Now, McCrery said USPS is working “to harness that data for the next best actions, with AI on the forefront” — a push that the agency expects to see come to fruition in a few months.
“In the summer, we’re going to be switching our call center platform to a cloud-based application where we have natural language interactions,” he said, adding “that’ll be the start of our AI journey.”
A large part of this journey also includes leveraging AI capabilities to provide more accurate responses to customer queries.
McCrery noted, for instance, that around 65% of complaints that USPS receives are from customers asking about the status of their packages. He said more specific data about packages assigned to certain tranches of agency containers, for instance, will help inform whether all of those deliveries are delayed, or if there is a more specific issue.
“That’s very manual today,” he said, but he added that through the use of AI, “we can be learning and growing where we can then start to monitor the improvements of resolution and bring those into the innovation.”
Although McCrery said USPS plans to make the switch this summer, current moves undertaken by the Trump administration and the Elon Musk-helmed Department of Government Efficiency have added a new wrinkle to the agency’s planned adoption of new AI capabilities.
Last week, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told lawmakers that he signed an agreement with the General Services Administration and DOGE to assist with “identifying and achieving further efficiencies” across the agency. DeJoy, who is planning to step down from the agency once the USPS board finds a successor, has focused on streamlining the service’s operations while also significantly reducing its costs.
Both President Donald Trump and Musk have voiced support in the past for privatizing USPS. The Washington Post also reported last month that Trump was preparing to sign an executive order to dissolve the service’s leadership and fold it into the Commerce Department, although that order was not released.
