Brazil's Vibra Reshapes Logistics with AI, Cutting Inventory by R$900 Million
en.Wedoany.com Reported - Vibra, Brazil's largest fuel distributor, has horizontally integrated artificial intelligence (AI) into its operational architecture, covering supply forecasting, logistics scheduling, and fleet management. The company currently serves more than 10,400 corporate clients, covering approximately 7,500 gas station outlets across over 2,300 cities, completing a delivery every 20 seconds on average; each month, it coordinates hundreds of complex logistics flows, mobilizing around 10,000 trucks to complete 55,000 shipments—equivalent to circling the Earth 804 times in monthly product transport volume.
As a fuel distribution network spanning a vast country, this system's operation requires anticipating external fluctuations in advance. Imported diesel takes up to 45 days from order to port arrival, while geopolitical factors continue to influence market prices. To address this, Vibra has built a forecasting system based on digital twins. These virtual replicas integrate real-time data, simulate fuel market behavior, and predict demand. The company now has over 135 digital twin models and 96 specific demand models, enabling it to anticipate consumption trends by region, product, and period months in advance. Data sources integrated into the system include agricultural harvests, macroeconomic variables, and more. In supply decisions, Vibra relies on simulated scenarios rather than historical data alone, booking cargo vessels 45 days ahead to mitigate manual operational risks and ensure supply stability before fuel reaches the pump.
The practical application of algorithms has already generated quantifiable financial returns across multiple areas. In warehousing, multivariate intelligent processing is used to calibrate optimal inventory levels for each base and product, with model error margins below 2% and performance 20% higher than the legacy market system. This has achieved an inventory reduction of R$900 million, freeing up tied-up capital.
In logistics, artificial intelligence evaluates more than 10,000 variables in real time, optimizing transport routes between 90 distribution bases and final destinations, planning new polygonal return routes, with realized and potential gains in freight efficiency reaching tens of millions of reais. In fleet management, mathematical models calculate the optimal road fleet size, reducing the required number of vehicles by 11%. Currently, 100% of Vibra's delivery fleet is equipped with onboard AI and fatigue-monitoring cameras, cutting accident rates by 67%. In the commercial domain, AI agents are used to support sales teams while also handling engineering department tasks such as deviation analysis, cargo arrival forecasting, and industrial asset Health Index monitoring.
The company is now transitioning further toward an autonomous control tower. This system is a centralized governance and orchestration platform used to monitor, coordinate, and manage autonomous AI agent systems, serving as an intelligent cockpit that ensures agents collaborate under traceable conditions to optimize complex operations. Daniel Drumond, Vibra's Vice President of Operations, stated that artificial intelligence has transformed the company's efficiency, and the true value lies in repositioning the human role within operations; with the evolution toward an agentic control tower, manual execution work will shift to a model centered on supervision, critical decision-making, and continuous improvement. Through investment in workforce training and proprietary technology, the company is accelerating productivity and competitiveness across the nation's energy chain.
