Fontana’s AI automation agency.

Fontana is the freight engine of the Inland Empire. Sitting where I-10, I-15, and SR-210 converge, the city holds roughly 140 large-scale warehouses and has approved more than 70 new ones since 2010. Amazon runs its LAX9 fulfillment center here (about 4.05 million square feet on 93 acres), and Coca-Cola, Target, FedEx, Walmart, Costco, and Smart & Final all operate distribution facilities in town. Transportation and warehousing is the single largest employment sector, with more than 15,000 local jobs.

Steel and manufacturing run just as deep. California Steel Industries operates the finishing portions of the former Kaiser Steel mill, producing roughly 2 million tons of rolled steel a year plus an API line-pipe mill, with about 900 employees; Nucor became majority owner in December 2021. Healthcare anchors the third pillar: Kaiser Permanente Fontana Medical Center runs a roughly 450-bed hospital with about 10,000 staff and more than 1,500 physicians, the largest single employer in the city.

All of this volume creates relentless manual drag. Warehouse operators field nonstop shipment, receipt, and inventory inquiries against their WMS. Steel and manufacturing teams reconcile mill certs, shipping documents, and supplier paperwork by hand. Kaiser-adjacent clinics and the wider healthcare base chase scheduling, referrals, and patient access. And with a Latino-majority population (about 68 percent) and roughly 28 percent foreign-born residents, customer-facing teams need to handle English and Spanish at the same time.

Fontana firms deploying AI for warehouse inquiry handling, freight and dispatch documentation, mill-cert and quality-document automation, patient access, and bilingual customer service are pulling ahead of operators still running everything by hand. The new AB 98 warehouse standards (Fontana is named in the state warehouse concentration region) add a compliance layer that rewards operators who build audit-ready, well-documented systems from day one.