THE BIG STORY: A New Book On AI Just Used Autolane To Explain What Autonomous Delivery Actually Looks Like

Erika Debrah Reed's new book, "The Gift of Time: How AI Transforms Your Purpose and Our World," argues AI's real payoff is the time it gives back to people, not automation for its own sake. Deep in the chapter on how commerce is changing, she reaches for Autolane by name. The delivery angle is where it gets specific. In-car lockers let a grocery order, a prescription, or a retail package get sealed inside a vehicle while the customer attends to the other duties of life, turning the car into what she calls a mobile logistics node. That's a close description of the locker system and delivery platform Autolane has already built.

Reed's day job is AVP of Innovation and Customer Experience at Simon Property Group, a valued Autolane partner. The bigger point is for the people who own and operate curbs right now. Autonomous delivery platforms have gone from a pitch to a normal part of how a general audience author expects commerce to work.

Pick up "The Gift of Time": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HCRL53BR

Every property that waits for full certainty before building its own curb strategy is deciding, by default, to let someone else write that chapter first.

Image Source: Autolane

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AV ROUND UP

Tesla's Cybercab Just Started Giving Real Rides In Austin. Tesla opened its first vehicle with no steering wheel and no pedals to public riders today, after months of employee-only testing. A property that already reads every incoming AV isn't scrambling to figure out what just pulled up.

Waymo Just Opened Rides In Three Cities On The Same Day. Denver, San Diego, and Tampa all went live at once this week, pushing Waymo to 14 US cities total. Three cities in one week used to be a year's roadmap for this industry.

The Drone Delivery Race Just Named Austin And Phoenix As Its Next Stops. Walmart is closing in on 2 million drone deliveries, and Uber's new Zipline partnership is headed to Phoenix and Austin later this year. Two companies racing to drop packages from the sky are converging on two markets Autolane is already operating in.

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THIS WEEK ON LINKEDIN: A Strategist Asked Whether Tesla Is Still A Car Company At All

Ralf Meyer argued this week that Tesla's real business is becoming a cyber physical operating system, with the car as just one node alongside energy, robotics, and software. His point: the advantage stops living in the product and starts living in the system around it. Today made his case for him. Cybercab just started giving real rides in Austin, one more node in exactly the system he's describing, and the hard part was never the car. It's the system that knows it's coming and hands it off cleanly at the curb, which is the piece Autolane exists to run.

Read Ralf Meyer's post on LinkedIn: Linkedin

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THE LAST 50 FT

No new episode this week. However this is a great time to revisit Episode 4 with Ethan McKenna from RobotaxiTracker.com. He built the site that tracks Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox all in one place. Fleet directories, live wait times, and safety data are all presented in terms the general public can understand. This makes it the right rewatch for a week where Tesla and Waymo both just moved to new cities. 🎧

Listen on Spotify: Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts: Apple

Listen on YouTube: Youtube

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THE AUTOCOMM BRIEF TAKE

A book about AI and time just spent a chapter explaining the curb, and it didn't need to invent an example. That means the case we've been making to property operators for two years, that someone has to coordinate what's arriving, is starting to show up in places we didn't write ourselves.

Pair that with a week where Cybercab went public, Waymo opened three cities at once, and two companies started racing drones toward Austin and Phoenix, and the pattern gets hard to miss. This is not a future scenario anymore. It's happening in real cities, this week, and that's a real opportunity for the properties ready to move on it now, ahead of the crowd. The property that gets its curb sorted first isn't just avoiding chaos, it's the one every one of these companies wants to work with.

The retailers and REITs getting their curb ready now are the ones who get to read this book and nod. The ones waiting are going to be reading it as a warning instead.

The lane is changing. Let's make sure it leads somewhere worth going. 🏁

coverage.goautolane.com

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