Shownotes
In this Omni Talk Retail interview, recorded live from the Consumer Goods Forum Global Summit 2026 in Vienna, Chris Walton sits down with Will Zhao, Executive President of Neolix AI, to explore what it really takes to scale autonomous delivery from a technology experiment into a viable business.
With more than 20,000 autonomous delivery vehicles operating across 300+ cities and over 160 million autonomous kilometers logged, Will shares the lessons Neolix has learned about fleet density, network effects, regulatory partnerships, and why the future of autonomous delivery depends as much on operational excellence as it does on AI.
Key Topics Covered:
• What Neolix AI does and how its autonomous delivery network operates
• Lessons learned from 160 million autonomous kilometers
• Why scaling autonomous delivery is about more than technology
• The operational challenges behind large autonomous fleets
• How Neolix's "sell the kilometer" business model works
• Why fleet density matters more than geographic expansion
• The network effects of autonomous delivery
• How regulators are approaching autonomous vehicles around the world
• Addressing driver shortages through automation
• The impact of autonomous delivery on supply chain efficiency and inventory management
• Why consistency may be the biggest advantage of autonomous fleets
• Predictions for the future of autonomous delivery
Special thanks to the Consumer Goods Forum Global Summit and the CGF Leadership Studio sponsored by Vusion for supporting Omni Talk Retail's coverage in Vienna.
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy
Transcripts
Hello, this is Omnitalk Retail.
Speaker A:I'm Chris Walton and I am now coming to you live from day one of the Consumer Goods Forum Global Summit in Vienna, Austria from the Vuzion podcast studio.
Speaker A:Now joining me is Will Zhao.
Speaker A:Will is the executive president of Neolix AI.
Speaker A:Will, thank you for joining us.
Speaker B:Thank you for having me.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:What brings you to cgf?
Speaker B:Well, I'm coming here to introduce Neolix.
Speaker B:It's a pretty new technology, pretty new company to the market, but actually it's very important infrastructure for logistics for consumer goods.
Speaker B:And I come to basically to bring our growth story introduction of Neolix to the stage.
Speaker A:Awesome.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And tell us a little bit more, especially those back home.
Speaker A:What is Neolix AI?
Speaker B:Neolix AI is a company using physical AI technology for delivery.
Speaker B:We are the largest L4 autonomous driving fleet on the street, but only for delivery.
Speaker B:Right now we have more than 20,000 vehicles already on public road, helping the logistics companies, helping the shippers to do the delivery on the daily basis.
Speaker B:And the total mileage has been over 160 million kilometer already.
Speaker B:That's the largest globally and it's the most commercialized fleet globally as well.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:So, yeah, so essentially you're doing autonomous deliveries for retailers and brands, I'm assuming, and hence why you're at CGF.
Speaker A:And you mentioned the scale.
Speaker A:You said 160 million autonomous kilometers.
Speaker A:That's a lot.
Speaker A:I want to make sure I get the other numbers right too.
Speaker A:You're in 300 plus cities, you've got, you're in over 15 countries as well.
Speaker A:So that is a tremendous amount of scale.
Speaker A:What are the lessons you've learned along the way as you've gotten to that level of scale?
Speaker A:Because I imagine it's not easy working with all those different municipalities out there.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's not actually having the technology, technology in one city, in one route is only the start.
Speaker B:Having so many vehicles on the road is super challenging.
Speaker B:Firstly, it's actually about the technology itself.
Speaker B:It takes time, it takes a lot of investment to make it happen.
Speaker B:And also what makes beautiful is we actually learn when we have more fleets on the road every single day.
Speaker B:Secondly, actually it's about operation.
Speaker B:There's a lot of things about beyond the AI.
Speaker B:We have the vehicle, we have the technology ready.
Speaker B:That's only one of the ten steps.
Speaker B:And beyond that we have teleoperation, we have maintenance, we have fleet management.
Speaker B:There are 10 more layers about that.
Speaker B:So that's a lot of things we need to cover.
Speaker B:A lot of lessons.
Speaker B:We have Learned during the journey.
Speaker A:Right, Yeah, I want to go into that a little bit more too because what's really interesting about what you're trying to do is, is you have to prove that technology works.
Speaker A:Like you have to prove that you can actually drive a vehicle autonomously through all these cities.
Speaker A:But then you also have to prove the business model too, at the same time that it's valuable to the people that actually want to deploy it once the technology works.
Speaker A:So how do you think about that?
Speaker B:Yeah, actually having the vehicle for one ship or for one city is more like a marketing story.
Speaker B:But when you have all the vehicles on road, actually the clients actually ask what's the outcome?
Speaker B:What's the benefit I have on the daily operation?
Speaker B:So we need to have a business model associated as well.
Speaker B:We actually currently sell the kilometers, we don't sell vehicle.
Speaker B:So that's the new evolution of the business model.
Speaker B:So it's more like uber business model.
Speaker B:We don't want the shipper to take the capex.
Speaker B:We can help them to save money to increase efficiency on daily basis.
Speaker A:Okay, interesting.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:Okay, I did not know that angle to it.
Speaker A:So the other question I have, whenever we start talking about autonomous deliveries or autonomous vehicles in general, how do you look at density in an area versus the number of areas that you're operating in?
Speaker A:What are the trade offs there?
Speaker B:Yeah, we just addressed a little bit.
Speaker B:Having for example, we have the largest city right now, very close, 2,000 vehicles in the city already.
Speaker B:That's the most dense city about autonomous driving vehicles already.
Speaker B:It's roughly twice of San Francisco already.
Speaker A:Oh, wow.
Speaker B: And having: Speaker B: But having: Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:That's a challenge to all companies trying to do L4.
Speaker B:As I said, we need to deal with the real daily operation.
Speaker B:But the beauty is we have the network effect.
Speaker B:So that actually saves a lot of money for the shaper in the city.
Speaker B:Having all the vehicles in different cities actually doesn't really save money for the shipper, but the network itself play a very important role.
Speaker B:For example, when shipper makes order, they can receive the vehicle very quickly.
Speaker B:And also the vehicle will be.
Speaker B:The utilization of the vehicle will be significantly increased by sharing, by being shared by each other in the city 24 hours.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So the key takeaway there being like density is a lot harder to do than just expansion.
Speaker A:And so if you are evaluating this technology, whether you're at this conference or at home watching and you're evaluating A technology like this, you're going to want to go with somebody that can prove out the fact that they've got a density in their network by certain cities.
Speaker B:Particularly.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:When we overcome older challenges, challenges about the density.
Speaker B:I think the shapers will be definitely enjoying future of robust future physical AI on road being 10 times cheaper, but much more safer, much more efficient than the human right now.
Speaker B:So the density will play an important role of doing that.
Speaker A:Okay, got it.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:Since we're in Vienna.
Speaker A:We're in Vienna, Austria.
Speaker A:I gotta ask you about Europe and expansion.
Speaker A:What are your thoughts on Europe and overall expansion of the company?
Speaker B:Yeah, my learning about Europe is it's not one country, it's actually many.
Speaker A:Right, that's always what I hear.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:So when we come here, actually the first one is we try to learn we are not actually picking countries to cover.
Speaker B:We are actually work with regulators who are open for discussion.
Speaker B:I think one trend is it used to be the regulator asking whether we should allow this gradually.
Speaker B:The regulators are asking how we can enable this.
Speaker B:So that's.
Speaker B:I think more and more regulators, more and more governments are believing this is definitely the future, especially for Europe.
Speaker B:We see the shortage of driver as more and more a trend going forward and we want to, we actually, we don't want to take over the job.
Speaker B:We want to act as the, as the supply, actual supply because the button is always under the regulator.
Speaker B:They can control the number of vehicles running on road.
Speaker B:Really it's very different from for example ride hailing business.
Speaker B:It's really controlled regulated industry by the local government.
Speaker A:Okay, wow, wow.
Speaker A:Okay, I didn't know that either.
Speaker A:So we're at cgf.
Speaker A:I'm gonna get you out of here on this question.
Speaker A:Creating a flexible and agile supply chain is a key topic of this conference.
Speaker A:It's one of the devoted tracks at the conference.
Speaker A:What as we step back from the whole discussion we've had, what is the major inefficiencies that autonomous delivery or efficiency that autonomous delivery helps to get around or improve upon?
Speaker B:Yeah, there are a lot of benefits as I mentioned, the cost consistence of delivery.
Speaker B:But if I have to choose one, I'll give you an example.
Speaker A:Yeah, please.
Speaker B:Because the human drivers have different situations.
Speaker B:The average performance is there.
Speaker B:But there's a range from the best performer and worst performer.
Speaker B:And human can take leaves.
Speaker B:Human can like maybe quit the industry for random reason.
Speaker B:So that actually asks.
Speaker B:That requires the shapers, the consumer good players.
Speaker B:They have to keep their inventories just for in case situation.
Speaker B:What if the situation happens.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:So having a robot with stable performance, the consistency itself there's makes a difference already.
Speaker B:So that was significantly reduced inventory of the consumer goods players for the business to operate so that the money will go back to the business so that beyond all the benefits of autonomous driving, I think the business itself will benefit as well as a result of the technology.
Speaker A:Got it.
Speaker A:So it basically helps eliminate the human variability that enters into the supply chain, which is what we hear typically with automation.
Speaker A:So that's very in line.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker A:All right, I lied.
Speaker A:I have one more question for you.
Speaker A:Let's put your prediction hat on.
Speaker A:We always love predictions here.
Speaker A:How long before you think we see autonomous delivery vehicles peppering the landscape globally?
Speaker B:Well, I think it will start definitely from the developed countries because it's addressing the pain points about, as I said, shortage of driver.
Speaker B:We don't have to replace the job that people want to take.
Speaker B:We have to.
Speaker B:For example, I think some benefits we can enjoy from the robots is nighttime because it's not really healthy for driver to drive during nighttime.
Speaker B:So we can ask the robots to start with, for example, very small use case during nighttime in developed countries.
Speaker B:But gradually I do believe that's the trend.
Speaker B:Probably it will be happening very soon because we have 20,000 vehicles already.
Speaker B:Probably more than 80% of the vehicles happened in last 18 months.
Speaker A:Oh, wow.
Speaker B:So we do see the trend is accelerating more and more.
Speaker B:So I do believe the future is coming very soon.
Speaker A:Awesome.
Speaker A:Awesome.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:This is why I love what I do.
Speaker A:So thank you.
Speaker A:Will, thank you so much for joining me for kicking off our coverage here at the Consumer Goods Forum Global Summit in Vienna.
Speaker A:Thanks to Fusion for making our coverage possible.
Speaker A:We're going to be interviewing executives like Will all conference long for the next three days.
Speaker A:So stick around, tune in and as always, be careful out there.