PepsiCo and Gatik unveiled a multi-year strategic partnership to deploy driverless freight inside the food giant's North American supply chain, making it the largest commercial autonomous freight deployment to date. Gatik is already running driverless box trucks for PepsiCo across Texas, Arizona and Arkansas, hauling Frito-Lay and beverage loads between distribution centers and retailers including Walmart.
Why this matters
The deal pushes autonomous trucking past the pilot stage and into the day-to-day operations of one of the world's most demanding consumer goods supply chains. PepsiCo products are consumed more than one billion times a day across 200+ countries, and the company is now using Gatik's Level 4 trucks to add capacity, improve delivery consistency and reduce variability without overhauling its existing fleet operations.
How the deployment works
Gatik's interpretable Gatik Driver AI stack handles end-to-end deliveries on highways and surface streets, with dynamic route orchestration spanning hundreds of pickup and drop-off points. The company first deployed with PepsiCo in 2022 and went fully driver-out in June 2025; it now operates with more than 98% on-time delivery and has expanded across Texas, Arkansas, Arizona, Nebraska and Ontario.
What's next
"Autonomous trucking has reached commercial scale when it operates inside one of the most demanding supply chains on the planet," said Gatik CEO Gautam Narang. The multi-year deal follows Gatik's January 2026 disclosure of $600 million in contracted commercial work and lands in the same week as Walmart and Wing's seven-city drone delivery expansion and Aurora and Hirschbach's 500-truck driverless agreement, signaling that real driverless freight is moving from demo to default.
Reporting based on coverage from Gatik, PepsiCo, FreightWaves and The Robot Report.