US Patent Issued to Maplebear on Nov. 18 for "Replacing an unavailable item in an order using a trained outcome prediction model" (California, Illinois, Nevada Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Nov. 18 -- United States Patent no. 12,475,503, issued on Nov. 18, was assigned to Maplebear Inc. (San Francisco).

"Replacing an unavailable item in an order using a trained outcome prediction model" was invented by Benjamin Knight (Oakland, Calif.), Saumitra Maheshwari (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Jennie Braunstein (San Francisco), Darren Johnson (Elko, Nev.), Kenneth Jason Sanchez (Orange, Calif.) and Christopher Billman (Chicago).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An online system receives orders from users and dispatches pickers to fulfill the orders by obtaining ordered items at a retailer. If an ordered item cannot be found by a picker, the picker may refund the item or attempt to f...