Case Study: United Parcel Service achieves faster development and AI-powered customer service with Microsoft Azure

UPS paves the way for better service with faster development and artificial intelligence

United Parcel Service (UPS), a global logistics leader handling millions of daily shipments, faced a fragmented mobile landscape with separate Android and iOS apps that doubled development and maintenance effort and slowed feature parity across devices. With more than 130,000 lines of legacy mobile code and a desire to explore conversational AI for customer service, UPS needed a way to accelerate development, reduce duplication, and offer new, modern interaction channels.

UPS rewrote its mobile app using Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin and a shared C# codebase—nearly halving the code footprint—and adopted Visual Studio/TFS to deliver features across platforms in days or weeks instead of months. At the same time it built UPS Bot on the Microsoft Bot Framework, LUIS, and Azure (with Application Insights and Bing Maps), prototyping in weeks and launching to production in months; the bot has since handled 200,000+ conversations, improved customer access to tracking and rates, and delivered scalable, telemetry-driven service while boosting developer productivity.

United Parcel Service

Ted Damianos

Senior Application Development Manager, Internet Systems