Growing Tractor Supply's in-house delivery operations has required adjustments and improvements aided by artificial intelligence, Kyle Langley, the retailer's VP of final mile, said at Home Delivery World 2026 in Nashville last month.
Tractor Supply began scaling its private fleet at the start of 2025, Langley said during a conference panel, coinciding with a plan to boost the company's final-mile capabilities. The plan calls for establishing delivery hub locations and tapping employees to deliver most of the larger and bulkier orders, aiming to lower costs and increase efficiency.
Since the plan was set in motion, the company's delivery activity has spiked. For the quarter that ended March 28, Tractor Supply saw a double-digit year-over-year increase in delivery volume.
Drivers originally handled the building of delivery routes themselves, as the process isn't as complex when there are only a few deliveries a day, Langley said. But as volume grew, the retailer wanted to ensure routing was as efficient as possible.
To that end, Tractor Supply tasked its territory managers to build the routing with the help of AI tools and "act like a dispatch office," Langley said. These managers are responsible for ensuring route efficiency and maximizing each vehicle’s use. Shifting route-building tasks to territory managers enables drivers to focus on building customer relationships in the field, according to Langley.
"We don't want them focused on all the metrics," Langley said of drivers. "That's why we've got field leadership."
An increase in delivery volume also resulted in more customer calls to stores asking about the status of their orders. The company first looked at how it could automate the handling of some of the calls. However, this ultimately wasn't the right approach given the connection between Tractor Supply stores and their local customer bases, Langley said.
"We quickly realized we were solving the wrong problem by trying to reduce inbound volume, when really the problem was we hadn't armed our store team members with the right information, which can also be used and powered by AI," Langley said, adding that this makes it easier for store employees to nurture customer relationships.
During a delivery driver's route, the amount of time spent at an address can be unpredictable, Langley said. This is because of the additional handling and moving time needed for big and bulky items and the expansive farm properties drivers often drop off the products.
"It could be a doorstop delivery, and those are quick, two minutes in and out, or it could be weaving your way through multiple farm gates, going into the barn and actually stacking the feed for them," Langley said.
Tractor Supply doesn't want to disincentivize drivers for "going above and beyond" on customer service during extended stops, Langley said. Instead, the company is pursuing AI-powered estimates of how long deliveries will take. This will enable Tractor Supply to establish greater predictability in driver delivery operations and understand at the address and market levels what to expect at each stop, Langley said.
"We need some kind of parameters and expectations and predictability around that, so that's what we're going to be going after next," Langley said.
