Google parent company Alphabet held a secret 'logistics summit' last week with reps from FedEx and other shipping companies

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The Alphabet Advanced Logistics Summit was hosted by Alphabet's research and development unit, X, and Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners. The objective was to explore business models and investment opportunities in logistics and fulfillment.

It also comes a few months after Sidewalk Labs spun out a separate entity in August called, which is still backed by Alphabet and Sidewalk Labs. SIP focuses on owning, acquiring and investing in technology-enabled infrastructure, particularly in urban areas.

Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners co-founders and co-CEOs Brian Barlow and Jonathan Winer were among the meeting's main moderators. They outlined several points the company was using to consider potential business opportunities, including "Accelerating Fulfillment and Delivery" and "Automated, Advanced Warehousing."

Alphabet executives seemed most interested in the analytics side of things, which could help customers predict what products they could buy and sell, attendees said. The company could break through in predictive fulfillment, which is an industry term that describes forecasting demand by predicting buyer and seller behavior. Discussions involved potentially being able to use the vast data from Google's search queries and keywords.

"Expansion in the breadth of a fulfillment network requires either the flexible, low CapEx approach of an on-demand warehousing or a standardized, partially-automated facility using modular robotics," read one Alphabet presentation slide titled "Key Question No. 3." That slide gave examples of companies Fabric and Takeoff, Stord, Flexe and Darkstore.

Attendees also discussed the role of hardware and how drone delivery could be used. Wing, the drone company that spun out from Alphabet's X division last year, beat Amazon in

 

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