Transcripts
Welcome to a special edition of Unboxing Logistics.
Speaker:I'm your host, Lori Boyer from EasyPost, and today we are gonna be
Speaker:talking about a big event that just happened last week, Parcel Forum.
Speaker:Really exciting.
Speaker:We were the AI in Logistics sponsor of the Parcel Forum Show.
Speaker:I had the absolute pleasure and privilege of speaking with the one and only the
Speaker:Unboxing Logistics godfather Tom Butt, and we were able to talk about AI.
Speaker:So we're really excited today because we're just gonna give you a few little
Speaker:things, what we heard at Parcel Forum, what all the scuttlebutt is, and
Speaker:kind of just some of the highlights of the things we talked about at AI.
Speaker:Tom, before we jump in, reintroduce yourself.
Speaker:I know that you are a, a classic favorite here at the Unboxing Logistics
Speaker:family, but for those of who happen to have missed one of your appearances,
Speaker:tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker:Yeah, sure.
Speaker:So I appreciate the, the privilege of coming back.
Speaker:I always love talking on the podcast here.
Speaker:So a a little bit about myself.
Speaker:Tom Bott, a
Speaker:senior manager here at EasyPost of AI and analytics.
Speaker:I've been in the operations and technology space going on, gosh, 15
Speaker:plus years now and have worked with major retail organizations to come up
Speaker:with strategies to leverage technology to better execute operations specifically
Speaker:for supply chain, direct to consumer.
Speaker:And with EasyPost here in, in the parcel space.
Speaker:So have the privilege of diving in headfirst to the AI topic, which
Speaker:seems to be all the buzz these days.
Speaker:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker:And I mean, let's just start there.
Speaker:What was the buzz you heard on the floor of Parcel Forum?
Speaker:What was everybody talking about?
Speaker:Doesn't have to be AI.
Speaker:Just, you know, what, what, what were you hearing from everybody in the industry?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Some, some key themes in just talking, you know random one-offs at the
Speaker:conference were around uncertainty in the, the supply chain space, the
Speaker:ever-growing complexity the ever-growing expectations of consumers in terms
Speaker:of how they get their packages the different methods that they want them.
Speaker:Everyone seems to want everything right now.
Speaker:They want fast.
Speaker:They want it cheap.
Speaker:And so the parcel space in particular a lot of the shippers are getting
Speaker:squeezed to, to do more with less.
Speaker:And it really bodes well for AI.
Speaker:And everyone in the AI space was talking and kind of comparing notes and
Speaker:saying this AI thing, is it a buzzword?
Speaker:How are you guys using it?
Speaker:When is the starting gun gonna go off?
Speaker:And so we, we talked about that during our session.
Speaker:Absolutely I that, those are similar things that I heard
Speaker:and conversations I had.
Speaker:Everyone's kind of in the same place where there's a lot going on right now
Speaker:and as we're just about kicking off peak season here for 2025, uncertainty,
Speaker:I love that you said that because that's kind of in the name of the game
Speaker:is everyone's not exactly sure what's gonna happen and absolutely right.
Speaker:I, I felt like as well, there are a lot of people who are kind of like, yeah,
Speaker:I know AI, like I should be using it and it's awesome, but I don't really
Speaker:know how, and I don't really, you know, is there's a lot of confusion around
Speaker:where and how and, and to implement AI.
Speaker:Did, did you hear that as well?
Speaker:For for sure.
Speaker:You know, there are a lot of tools out there.
Speaker:It seems like every single platform you go into is like, oh, try this new AI feature.
Speaker:Whether or not that's something like a Google Gemini or if
Speaker:that's, you know, just ChatGPT or
Speaker:could be anything from, you know, summarizing calls and taking notes.
Speaker:So I, I think a lot of it is there's just this amorphous like,
Speaker:hey, AI can help us, but how?
Speaker:And, and so what we were really talking about during the, the session that we had
Speaker:was, you know, start small, start very targeted and say, how, how can I use AI
Speaker:to help me with a very specific problem?
Speaker:You know, outline your objectives, outline expectations of what you're looking to do.
Speaker:And by doing that you can be a little bit more targeted, a little bit
Speaker:more strategic about how you use it.
Speaker:Yeah, I loved that.
Speaker:I loved hearing people talk about AI is really effective
Speaker:when you start with your problem.
Speaker:So just what you said, like don't just try to squeeze AI into a pigeonhole just
Speaker:because you wanna use AI, but if you have a problem, which, I don't know if we ever
Speaker:don't have a problem in our industry.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:That's one of the things I, I love about the operation space
Speaker:is you can always get faster.
Speaker:You can always get cheaper.
Speaker:You can always provide a better customer experience and that that
Speaker:frictionless buying experience, if you're going direct to consumer or
Speaker:if you're doing B2B, you know, you're your customers, you're looking to just
Speaker:make things just sharper crisper, more clear, those sorts of things.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I also, somebody mentioned being able to see your ROI.
Speaker:I think that that's another critical one when you are looking for AI tools,
Speaker:you should be able to measure if you are saving time or saving money things
Speaker:like that so that, you know, it's not just a buzzword, not just hype.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And you know, with that one of the things we talked about was, you
Speaker:know, creating a scorecard, looking at it, breaking down by di different
Speaker:dimensions speed, cost, quality, what you're doing to support sales.
Speaker:And what you're doing to help support the customer experience you know, come at
Speaker:it with a kind of a, a framework that you can assess and say, hey, for each of
Speaker:those dimensions, how far am I off from where I would expect to be or want to be?
Speaker:And then that's gonna help you prioritize what sorts of things to go after first.
Speaker:So again, just set up a, a framework, come up with an
Speaker:intention and, and go from there.
Speaker:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker:One of the areas that I felt like the, you know, our, our session
Speaker:attendees were really interested in was when you talked about kind of
Speaker:the specific areas or pain points.
Speaker:So Tom here at EasyPost deals with helping our customers with AI and so he
Speaker:actually kind of sees on the front line.
Speaker:A lot of what, where they are using AI, how does it work, how does it not work?
Speaker:Where do they see hiccups?
Speaker:So the audience was really interested in hearing what are the kind of pain points
Speaker:that you're seeing where AI is being effective, where you are being able to use
Speaker:that scorecard and kind of track things.
Speaker:Can you share that with our, our Unboxing Logistics family as well?
Speaker:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker:So again, with the uncertainty in supply chain all the factors to consider you
Speaker:know, we are seeing just this continued push for carrier diversification.
Speaker:You know, carriers are offering different service levels.
Speaker:There's a lot of different moving parts and pieces.
Speaker:And so with that, we're seeing customers use AI.
Speaker:We have a specific tool that helps people sort through all of the, I'll
Speaker:call it granular or very particular instances, so of, of how to get
Speaker:things to customers faster, how to get things to customers more cheaply.
Speaker:And in particular kind of getting that intersection of both faster and cheaper.
Speaker:So we're using AI to just crunch through tons of different data points,
Speaker:billions and billions of shipments.
Speaker:And what that's allowing customers to do is, again, get,
Speaker:get the best of both worlds.
Speaker:In the past, it was either cost or time in transit that you'd
Speaker:be looking to optimize for.
Speaker:But we're seeing our customers use AI to, to really get the best of both worlds.
Speaker:All of the different factors to consider, you know, different zip codes
Speaker:to deliver to surcharges dynamic landscape of, of carrier rates.
Speaker:AI is really helping in that space.
Speaker:There's also maybe a little bit more I call it sentiment analysis.
Speaker:So people looking at summarizing customer experience, going through loading their,
Speaker:their customer feedback to, to suss out key themes of, of what might be going on.
Speaker:That's gonna allow you to have a, a better pulse on where
Speaker:your opportunities might lie.
Speaker:So there's that hard, like, hey, we're gonna go after these specific metrics
Speaker:and targets, but there's also this distillation of sentiment that you can
Speaker:get to that is gonna also give you kind of a roadmap for how you would,
Speaker:how you'd navigate the parcel space, especially as we get into the peak season.
Speaker:So, okay.
Speaker:So what I was hearing was really good uses of AI when it comes to kind of carrier
Speaker:selection, route selection, service level selection to make sure that you
Speaker:can optimize for both cost and speed.
Speaker:And so when you said consumer sentiment, so kind of what if, how people are feeling
Speaker:about, how your customers are feeling about the experience that they're getting.
Speaker:Correct?
Speaker:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker:And you know, if you're loading customer comments or if you're using AI to do you
Speaker:know customer experience or customer contact, customer support calls,
Speaker:you can use that, that AI to kind of layer in and analyze that, to give you
Speaker:summaries and things of, of that nature.
Speaker:I know in our sales opportunities, we're using a product called Gong
Speaker:that allows us to make sure that we're capturing exactly what the customer is
Speaker:looking to get at, allows us to reflect on how do we best serve that customer.
Speaker:So that's something that can, can be extended across AI tools.
Speaker:Absolutely.
Speaker:That was something as well, people, we had questions about
Speaker:which tools do we recommend?
Speaker:Feel free to reach out.
Speaker:I have some lists of tools that a lot of companies are using.
Speaker:Of course, here at EasyPost, we love our Luma tool
Speaker:for checking your that kind of time in transit, spend, figuring out carriers.
Speaker:Carriers are our, what we live and breathe every day.
Speaker:So that's where our expertise is.
Speaker:But there are a lot of tools that are really great out
Speaker:there across the spectrum.
Speaker:Tom, do you have any specific stories or examples you can share maybe of
Speaker:customers or people you've talked to on, you know, their experience
Speaker:going through implementing AI, what that looked like and, and how they
Speaker:were able to, you know, create their scorecard or, or do anything like that?
Speaker:You know, we're, we're getting a lot of customers that are looking
Speaker:at how can we use AI to make better predictions about what carriers
Speaker:maybe that I'm not using today, but carriers that I, I should be using.
Speaker:So we have customers where they're maybe just using or, a couple of carriers,
Speaker:so UPS, FedEx but they're really, you know, Amazon is a new player in
Speaker:this space in terms of expansion from just their, their in-house networks.
Speaker:So we've used AI to ask you know, basically our, our customer data to say,
Speaker:hey, are there if we brought Amazon in or if we brought another carrier and maybe
Speaker:a regional carrier, like Better Trucks or, or OnTrac what would it look like
Speaker:and what types of shipments would we use or what types of shipments would best
Speaker:be leveraged on those different carriers maybe that we don't have yet today?
Speaker:So it's a little bit of a, a scenario builder that allows people to kick
Speaker:the tires on how they can expand or how they can augment their carrier
Speaker:network the impact that that might have.
Speaker:And it's, it's really looking at every single individual package that you had
Speaker:shipped in, you know, like a la a last 30 day period and give you the insight
Speaker:to say, hey, this is the value that it could provide if you bring it in.
Speaker:So we're augmenting you know, maybe a, an analysis that you did in the past
Speaker:we're using lots of different data points.
Speaker:We're using the AI to make recommendations on how you could augment your network.
Speaker:Do you see a specific, like, kind of general percentage of, you know, how
Speaker:much they can reduce in parcel spend?
Speaker:I know that obviously numbers are gonna be totally different from
Speaker:customer to customer, but are we talking 10%, are we talking 1%?
Speaker:Are we talking 6942%?
Speaker:Sure.
Speaker:I give you a, a generic number wide range.
Speaker:We're seeing anything from a, a couple percentage points.
Speaker:So you know, but for somebody that's shipping a lot of volume, that few
Speaker:percentage might be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.
Speaker:But we do see some customers, depending on, you know, maybe they're only using
Speaker:a single carrier right now and they'd want to expand to a multi-carrier
Speaker:service, they could save up to 25%.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So it, it is quite a range.
Speaker:It kind of depends on where you're starting from.
Speaker:If you're already highly optimized or using AI to some extent
Speaker:already there might not be as, as much juice for the squeeze.
Speaker:If you are coming from a place where you haven't really touched your network in
Speaker:a while, and there's lots of opportunity to expand, to make adjustments you know,
Speaker:we are seeing it in that 20, 25% range.
Speaker:Yeah, I, I had a great conversation at Parcel Forum with a woman where she has a,
Speaker:a flower selling business and she's she ships about 10 to 15,000 packages a month.
Speaker:But she's always used a single carrier.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And for me it's just like, like so much opportunity.
Speaker:If you are listening and you happen to be somebody who's really stuck with one
Speaker:or two carriers, that is a big signal that you probably have a good opportunity
Speaker:to really optimize your carrier mix.
Speaker:Now Tom, I get a lot of questions, so, and, and this
Speaker:was a question she had for me.
Speaker:I'm scared that if I move away from a single carrier that I'm not
Speaker:gonna be able to get good rates 'cause I put all my volume together
Speaker:so that I can negotiate rates.
Speaker:How, how do you respond to, to that question?
Speaker:Sure.
Speaker:I think we can still look to, to use carriers in a lot of
Speaker:the instances to make sure that you're getting volume discounts.
Speaker:That said, there may be a, a subset of your shipments where we can start small.
Speaker:We can look at how much volume would be shifted for things like
Speaker:two day or next day shipments.
Speaker:So we, we can kinda adjust the amount of, of volume that, that you may be looking
Speaker:to shift or to expand to multi-carrier.
Speaker:It doesn't have to be, hey, all of a sudden you add another carrier,
Speaker:it's 50% has to go this way.
Speaker:The other 50% has to go the other way.
Speaker:So you, you maybe lose those volume discounts.
Speaker:So you can start small and you can start optimizing subsets of your packages.
Speaker:Maybe you're getting the most customer complaints on those expedited services.
Speaker:You could optimize with AI that just those expedited services.
Speaker:Save the bulk of your shipments to go through your, your main carrier.
Speaker:But I, I'll just reiterate, if you are in single carrier, even if you're getting
Speaker:those discounts you are at the whim of that carrier and any sort of surcharges
Speaker:or price changes that they have.
Speaker:You know, there are instances where, you know, if it's a unionized environment,
Speaker:maybe the union goes on strike and then you're scrambling to, to go other places.
Speaker:So is there is that risk mitigation factor.
Speaker:But you don't have to go, you know, dive head first.
Speaker:You can start to dip your toes in the water and, you know, maintain your, your
Speaker:volume discounts and, and go from there.
Speaker:I love that and I love the idea of starting with
Speaker:somewhere you have a problem.
Speaker:So with AI in general, this is what I'm hearing.
Speaker:And you know, as I've spoken to different experts, start with a problem.
Speaker:Again, always start with the problem.
Speaker:So if you have, exactly like Tom was saying, maybe a certain area
Speaker:where you're getting delivery windows are missed by 15% or more.
Speaker:In a certain region or a certain lane.
Speaker:First of all, you can use AI tools to kind of determine where you are having
Speaker:problem spots, but even if all you do is know that you have a problem spots,
Speaker:you're probably not gonna get much worse.
Speaker:So start by experimenting with some different tools or, or options,
Speaker:maybe different carriers here.
Speaker:And you know, when you have a lot of data around it, that makes it so it's
Speaker:a lot easier for you to see, you know.
Speaker:If you're able to improve even 10% or something like that.
Speaker:I love starting with that small data rich problem.
Speaker:That to me is the easiest way to kind of segue into making
Speaker:a little bit of a change.
Speaker:Another area though, Tom, I hear is like, maybe it's repetitive or slow.
Speaker:Maybe you've got a lot of manual stuff going on.
Speaker:Those are other opportunities for AI.
Speaker:Is that what you've heard or seen as well?
Speaker:Yeah, I think those, those decision points you know, where you're
Speaker:making, you're having to adjust one-offs here, one-offs there, and
Speaker:it's consuming a lot of your time.
Speaker:I like to frame things in the,
Speaker:you know, the Pareto's sense of, of it.
Speaker:So
Speaker:maybe you only have 5% of your packages that are late.
Speaker:But those may be taking up, you know, 90, 95% of your time to to break from the 80.
Speaker:20 rule, to go to the 95, 95, 5 rule, or the 90, 90, 10 rule.
Speaker:So a, a lot of times when you are having those, those instances you can pop
Speaker:AI and look at your shipments, see what some of the exceptions may be.
Speaker:See if there's, you know, opportunities for delays within your carrier network.
Speaker:Where are those occurring?
Speaker:Is it, you know, pre-transit exceptions?
Speaker:So you're printing a label, but it's not scanning into the carrier network.
Speaker:You can take a look at those types of shipments.
Speaker:You can have AI analyze and say, hey, are those happening
Speaker:for a certain carrier set?
Speaker:Or are those happening kind of across the board?
Speaker:You may have different different solutions that you need to, to go after.
Speaker:But AI is gonna help you identify where those exceptions are and
Speaker:potentially make some recommendations on how to address those things.
Speaker:I know that we talk specifically about, you know, our, our AI solution.
Speaker:But you can, you
Speaker:know, pop things into ChatGPT as well
Speaker:and, and ask more strategic questions there.
Speaker:So there, there are some things where you can start to at least, you know generate
Speaker:a framework of how you wanna approach a pro a problem and then use it as you
Speaker:kind of go through the discovery journey.
Speaker:I know that there's, you know, buzzwords past, I know data science
Speaker:was a big one a couple years ago.
Speaker:Obviously analytics, you've got cloud.
Speaker:Those are all things that we see as, as iterative.
Speaker:So you still need a lot of those things.
Speaker:You need, you know, cloud to be able to aggregate all your
Speaker:data so that AI can analyze it.
Speaker:But I, I think in general again, you can use AI kind of throughout
Speaker:that discovery process and you can come up with the scientific method
Speaker:to you know, solve your problem.
Speaker:You know, again, start with that problem statement, but then kinda step through
Speaker:that journey with AI as, as a partner.
Speaker:Absolutely.
Speaker:I wanted just to jump into mistakes that we commonly see and I'm gonna kick us off.
Speaker:And then Tom, you can share any other mistakes you see.
Speaker:But one of the big mistakes when it comes to AI is underestimating the importance of
Speaker:your data being good data and clean data.
Speaker:Do you have any recommendations?
Speaker:You're just a data guy in general.
Speaker:How do you make sure that the data you're using or you know, that you
Speaker:have a single source of truth even because a lot of times different
Speaker:teams are using different data.
Speaker:What is the importance of data?
Speaker:Why is that important, and how can you kind of try to make sure
Speaker:that you're getting clean data?
Speaker:Sure.
Speaker:And I'll, I'll use the play out, played out mantra garbage in, garbage out.
Speaker:I think, you know, most of our listeners have probably heard of that.
Speaker:We have seen AI be very effective at anomaly detection.
Speaker:So, for example there may be true outliers in your data, but if you're
Speaker:pumping a data set into AI and asking, hey, what are my, some of my
Speaker:statistical outliers you can also use AI to simulate supplemental data.
Speaker:So if you only have you know, a lo a light amount of data you can
Speaker:use AI to generate additional data sets that, that you can reference.
Speaker:But using it for anomaly detection is something to at least get you down the
Speaker:journey of seeing how clean is your data.
Speaker:If you can just highlight, you know, things that may be, you
Speaker:know, a couple standard deviations outside of an expected value.
Speaker:I know for us, we've got some cartonization software that's out there,
Speaker:but, you know, you can ask, hey, what are, does, does this data look clean?
Speaker:Like, is it something that needs, you know, is it something that we
Speaker:should adjust or we need to augment to be a little bit more robust?
Speaker:But you can use some AI tools out there to, to assess that and to just ask, hey,
Speaker:where, you know, are there opportunities for me to clean this data up?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So use AI to, to kind of make sure you've got the clean data as well.
Speaker:I love that.
Speaker:One of the great things about AI is the fact that it sort of takes these
Speaker:really technical, difficult things and makes it easy for just regular
Speaker:people like me to understand it.
Speaker:So there are tools.
Speaker:Again, if you need specific names and tools, I'm not gonna jump
Speaker:into them all here 'cause I'll forget some of my favorites.
Speaker:But there are tools that help you look at your data and, and give you
Speaker:kind of the probability that maybe you've got some red flags in there.
Speaker:What other mistakes do you see though, Tom, when people
Speaker:are trying to implement AI?
Speaker:To go back to not having an intention, not having a, a process.
Speaker:I, I think that.
Speaker:You see a sparkly and you're like, ooh, that sounds good.
Speaker:That's a big one.
Speaker:I, I think the other one is just not getting started, right?
Speaker:So to, to say, hey, I, I don't know this.
Speaker:We'll kind of wait for others to get this figured out.
Speaker:I can tell you right now, there's not gonna be a starting gun.
Speaker:And those that adopt this adopt AI and start to build it into some
Speaker:methodologies, build it into frameworks are gonna have a head start and a leg up.
Speaker:Those are the, the customers that are gonna say, hey, I, or
Speaker:excuse me, the, the users that are gonna say, hey, what happened?
Speaker:Why are we so far behind our competitors?
Speaker:Why are we losing market share?
Speaker:Why are we not as competitive from a a cost perspective?
Speaker:The other thing that we do see a lot of people say, well, I
Speaker:don't know exactly what the AI is doing, so I'm not gonna use it.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So, so for example you know, you see that the AI is getting you better results.
Speaker:It's very good at, you know, you have an objective statement.
Speaker:It will optimize to drive toward that objective.
Speaker:So that could be, you know, cheaper shipping, faster shipping
Speaker:in the, in the parcel space.
Speaker:But I think if you don't,
Speaker:if you don't have a process to start to incorporate AI and you don't have a trust
Speaker:that the results are gonna be out there, those results are gonna be formatted to
Speaker:just say, hey, this is what I'm achieving.
Speaker:A lot of times people wanna see the exact how and sometimes AI
Speaker:isn't as great at doing that.
Speaker:Especially when you get into the data teams.
Speaker:You get the ops teams correct.
Speaker:That are like, well, let me see this.
Speaker:'Cause we're used to, I say we, like ops teams.
Speaker:I, I'm your, I'm your buddy.
Speaker:I'm not really ops teams, but yeah, you, you need to know that people feel
Speaker:that need to like have control, I guess.
Speaker:There is a little bit of a just take, let, let the AI make some decisions.
Speaker:Again, sometimes it's not gonna be able to explain that the reason it chose this
Speaker:particular shipment method, you may have to go back and say, well, there was a
Speaker:holiday here, or we're not seeing this statistical performance in aggregate
Speaker:from one carrier in one particular lane.
Speaker:So we do see a lot of people wanting to be very prescriptive and to basically
Speaker:have the AI do what they were doing in the way that they expect to do it.
Speaker:And this is a non-linear jump, so it's not gonna be like, hey, it's gonna do
Speaker:things exactly the same as, as I did it.
Speaker:You know, maybe I had a really complex rule set that I, I built out.
Speaker:It may just make decisions on factors that there's so many things that it can crunch.
Speaker:It's not gonna give you the exact secret sauce.
Speaker:But it'll be a good tasting sauce.
Speaker:Even calculators are like that.
Speaker:You know, if you're adding 324 plus 192, it just gives you a number.
Speaker:It doesn't say, oh, I carried this one, and I did.
Speaker:You know?
Speaker:And so at some point we had to kind of trust the technology
Speaker:that it's working correctly.
Speaker:I, that's a really, that's a really hard one for some of us, so, love that idea.
Speaker:Anything else there on mistakes?
Speaker:Otherwise, I wanna hear kind of just your takeaways on what people should do.
Speaker:I, I love the idea as well, I don't wanna miss this that people sometimes
Speaker:just don't do anything, like analysis paralysis or whatever, trust that,
Speaker:look, when you start using AI, there's probably gonna be some hiccups.
Speaker:There's gonna be times that it didn't work the way you thought, or there's
Speaker:gonna be times that you didn't realize or you didn't understand how to use it.
Speaker:That should not keep people from starting and implementing.
Speaker:'Cause as you said, the, it's already started.
Speaker:The, you know, you said the gun's not gonna go, the gun's gone off.
Speaker:You know, people are running to, and, and the only way for us to learn and to figure
Speaker:out where it is gonna be implemented is to actually kind of dive in here.
Speaker:So I love that point.
Speaker:Tom, any other mistakes?
Speaker:If not, what are kind of takeaways of, you know.
Speaker:What, how can they do, what can they do to get started this quarter?
Speaker:Any, any like, go out and do this?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I, I think part of it, and we talked about this during our session, was leadership.
Speaker:A lot of people are using AI in their day-to-day.
Speaker:But a lot of times leadership just doesn't really know, again, to,
Speaker:to go back to the starting gun hasn't started or hasn't gone off.
Speaker:I think part of it is as a leader, you're expected to have
Speaker:a vision for some of this stuff.
Speaker:So, so some of it is just
Speaker:you know, making sure that there's an owner of this and calling out
Speaker:that there's a responsibility from a leadership team perspective to, to
Speaker:go after and develop an AI strategy.
Speaker:A strategy doesn't have to be perfect, but if you have some sort of framework,
Speaker:some sort of vision for how your team can use this, can use the AI tools.
Speaker:You're gonna just be able to iterate on that.
Speaker:You're gonna be able to, to build on it, learn from your mistakes, kind of go
Speaker:through that process of, of discovery.
Speaker:So I think again, just not having a leadership vision is, is a big mistake.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:There, well, in our session we talked about, there was a, a
Speaker:study that was done recently.
Speaker:And it is leaders.
Speaker:So if you're leaders, you're getting called out a little bit here.
Speaker:It is leadership that tends to pull back, where team members tend to want
Speaker:to use AI a lot more, and leaders get a little bit more hesitant.
Speaker:So it's a good reminder actually, right before this podcast,
Speaker:I had a meeting with my team.
Speaker:I'm a leader of a team as well, and we were discussing AI tools and what
Speaker:we need to be using and how we can, and so make sure that you're, you're
Speaker:bringing that to your team as a leader.
Speaker:That's a, a great point, Tom.
Speaker:Everyone, it was great talking about AI.
Speaker:Some big takeaways for me.
Speaker:Just from today, but also from Parcel Forum, and from the session,
Speaker:is that we just gotta get started.
Speaker:AI is not perfect yet.
Speaker:Okay?
Speaker:We haven't found like the silver bullet AI that does everything,
Speaker:but if you are not doing something, you're getting left behind.
Speaker:There are a lot of great tools out there.
Speaker:But start with your problems.
Speaker:So if you're having a problem in the warehouse, look for a tool that's
Speaker:gonna do something in the warehouse if you're having carrier issues or
Speaker:if you're wanting to really save some money on your, your carrier spend
Speaker:as we come through peak, we've got a lot of big surcharges and stuff.
Speaker:You know, look at tools where you can simulate that and, and figure that out.
Speaker:But just start.
Speaker:And then figure out from there.
Speaker:That's my advice.
Speaker:That's really what I've been hearing is people are starting
Speaker:and seeing some really good wins.
Speaker:Any other takeaways from you, Tom?
Speaker:No, don't, don't let perfect get in the way of better.
Speaker:You know, it's.
Speaker:Love that automism, don't let perfect
Speaker:get in the way of better.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And, and again, just build on successes.
Speaker:If you can get some quick wins, prove ROI, basically market that with your
Speaker:teams and say, you know, congratulate people if they're being creative in how
Speaker:they're using AI in their day to day.
Speaker:And just build on, on the early wins.
Speaker:And I think, you know, as, as this comes along, AI is so new, you know, it's a,
Speaker:it's a space where we're all gonna be in this together, kind of learning as we go.
Speaker:But it should be a really exciting time.
Speaker:It should be a transformative time for our, our industry and,
Speaker:you know, society in general.
Speaker:Fantastic.
Speaker:Well said.
Speaker:AI's awesome.
Speaker:Give it a try.
Speaker:Just do something.
Speaker:Don't, don't let, you know, as, as Tom said, don't let perfect
Speaker:get in the way of better.
Speaker:So love that.
Speaker:If you are using some great AI tools, I would love for you to share.
Speaker:You can throw 'em in the comments if you're watching on YouTube
Speaker:or if you're on social media.
Speaker:Feel free to email if you have questions around AI tools.
Speaker:As Tom said, we're all in this together, so let's work together to figure out
Speaker:what you know is working for you.
Speaker:Tom, thanks again.
Speaker:Thanks for speaking with me at Parcel Forum.
Speaker:Thanks for being here and just being such a great supporter of the podcast,
Speaker:and it's been wonderful having you.
Speaker:Yeah, always a pleasure, Lori.
Speaker:And excited to see what, what people come back to us with.
Speaker:So appreciate it.
Speaker:Awesome.
Speaker:We'll see you all next time.
