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Artificial intelligence creates real encyclopedia

Numina Group compiles glossary of logistics terms with ChatGPT.

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Readers of this magazine already know about ChatGPT’s ability to write poetry about the power of the supply chain. Now comes news that the AI (artificial intelligence)-powered chatbot has expanded into a new genre: lexicography. To be precise, it has produced an 84-page glossary of supply chain industry terms.

A team of logistics professionals at Numina, a Woodridge, Illinois-based material handling software and consulting firm, recently announced that they had used ChatGPT to create a supply chain, transportation, and warehousing encyclopedia. The final product, which can be downloaded for free at https://numinagroup.com/lp/warehousing-encyclopedia/, contains definitions for terms like “accessorials,” “advance shipping notices (ASN),” “application programming interfaces (API),” “backhauls,” and “cluster picking,” to name just a few.


“There is no shortage of terms or acronyms in warehousing. Everyone who starts in this industry has a long learning curve just to understand the basics. To support our mission of ‘Moving Fulfillment Forward,’ we curated the first-ever warehousing encyclopedia using the ChatGPT AI (artificial intelligence) engine,” Numina said in a release. 

But in a sign of the times, the firm also included a disclaimer, reminding readers that “All entries in the encyclopedia were developed by an AI and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, ideas, or opinions of Numina Group.”

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