Breaking from the FreightTech AI pack: Companies make their case at TIA meeting
SAN ANTONIO – What became obvious in more than three hours of legacy companies and wet-behind-the-ears startups touting technology solutions for 3PLs at the Transportation Intermediaries Association's meeting is that artificial intelligence is absolutely real right now, and one of the next battles will be over what might be called the last mile of technology.
The presentations came during a Media Day at the TIA's annual Capital Ideas Conference, a day before the full launch of the largest gathering of freight brokers. One by one, nearly 20 companies laid out the capabilities of new or near-new technologies and capabilities they had launched to serve the 3PL industry.
While it was clear that the capabilities of generative AI are no longer the technology of the future and very much part of the present, it was just as obvious that the overlap of what many of these solutions do, which has always been a feature of technology products aimed at the supply chain, doesn't go away in the AI world. That's where the 'final mile' comes in, those small capabilities that the tech suppliers look to create to differentiate themselves from what is already becoming a crowded field.
For example, several presentations touted applications that would use AI to intake the never-ending stream of emails, text messages and phone calls a brokerage receives from drivers, other carrier employees or shippers. The new tools can use generative AI to formulate a response that meets the queries of the supply chain without consuming brokers' time, leaving them to more productive tasks. So far, there is no shortage of companies offering this service.
David Bell, the founder and CEO of CloneOps AI, whose company presented at the Media Day, said the unusual name of his startup – which launched its product in conjunction with the conference – came from the oft-heard wish that during times of worker overload, some of a company's more productive employees could be cloned.
'Your emails are stacking up, your phone calls are on hold, your voicemail is getting full, your texting is getting full, and you're a one person show trying to keep your head above water,' Bell said in an interview with FreightWaves, describing the situation that several companies face.
But with other companies offering similar AI products that take in communications and respond to them without human intervention when possible, the question to Bell was, how do you separate yourself from the pack? How does your last mile differ from that of others?
Bell spoke of his experience as the owner of Smith Cargo, a consolidator, and then the founder of Lean Solutions (which also presented at Media Day.)
But it wasn't just his background, Bell said. For example, he boasted of CloneOps' voice identification capabilities, which he said 'is going to prevent fraud right from the start.' If a call comes in from a 'fake carrier trying to get a load, it's going to identify if they're authorized to speak and if they're authorized to book a load on behalf of the carrier.'
The goal, Bell said, is to 'create a bad actors database of the voices that are actually stealing the loads.'
ParadeAI attended the conference but wasn't a presenter at TIA Media Day. However, its AI-driven offering is not duplicated by any of the companies that did present, as its capabilities involve using AI to provide what it calls capacity management.
ParadeAI, which founder and CEO Anthony Sutardja said launched in 2019, uses a variety of tools to develop a reservoir of information about carriers that AI then can use to provide information to brokers looking to secure capacity.
At its launch, Sutardja said, it used truck list emails to populate its data. 'We took the natural language processing technology that existed back then to start structuring it into available trucks for matching,' he said. 'That was one way of getting capacity,' he said.
With the addition of more FreightTech solutions being adopted by brokers, Sutardja said, all of them create further sources of capacity that can then be interpreted by AI to give a broker a look at available capacity that might be a match for the lane that is seeking trucking services.
The new features launched in conjunction with the TIA meeting are marketed under a product called CoDriver. The capabilities recently launched were described by Sutardja as a 'voice AI agent that can help have a conversation between the broker and carrier to discuss an available load, check if the carrier is qualified and check if it meets the load requirements.'
While capacity management capabilities are the core of ParadeAI's business, it also has a pricing product called Advantage.
ParadeAI and CloneOps both had booths on the TIA exhibition hall floor, which is dominated by FreightTech companies. CloneOps was also the sponsor of the conference's Wi-Fi; its brand marketing popped up whenever an attendee accessed that service.
OTR Solutions has multiple financial tools for the industry, including factoring and fuel cards. COO Grace Maher introduced OTR 365, which she called an 'always-on network of interconnected financial products delivering intelligent solutions and powerful technologies.' What this means for drivers getting paid, she said, is 'no more cutoff times for same-day funding, no more weekend or bank holiday delays.'
Pallet's AI solution is in the already crowded field of companies using AI to process and aid in what Jason Feng of the company's marketing team described as automation of 'any sort of repetitive workflow, including order entry, RFQ processing, track-and-trace and reconciliation.' Its product is called Copilot.
The role of AI 'agents,' essentially human-like robots with an element of a personality, came up several times during TIA Media Day. At TMS provider Revenova, the agent's name is Artimus, introduced earlier this year. Marketing manager Mike Marut said the main strength of AI agents is that they can be tailored to the capabilities of a brokerage. 'It's customized and configured to what you do in your operational processes, but it's going to be different from everybody else,' he said.
Michael Caney of Highway spoke about an upgrade to the company's visibility solution that combines it with the company's security validation, which is at the heart of Highway's rapid success in the market so far. It helps answer a key question that brokers need to answer to fight fraud: 'Are they [the carrier] within the geographic location of the load that they're looking at?'
One company whose AI-driven product didn't have any obvious matches was Qued. Based on the pitch from President Tom Curee, it also is focused on using AI to help manage the stream of communications, but its focus was on one particular task: appointments. 'Imagine all these different appointments that have to be scheduled,' he said. 'They're in web portals, they're in emails or phone calls.' The AI solution at Qued is designed to tackle that with new technology.
Crum & Foster rolled out new ways of accessing its TripExcess insurance offering that sells insurance to cover a high-value load whose value exceeds the coverage in a carrier or broker's insurance policies.
Fleetworks introduced a solution that involves AI-produced conversations that can take the place of human interaction with phones and email for more routine tasks. Its new product also involves an AI-driven tool that can speak multiple languages.
Freight Claims is a new company that will use AI and machine learning to produce automated workflows dealing with claims, which founder and CEO Mike Schember said was 'the last department to get any resources in any organization.'
Get Real Rates, according to its co-founder Omar Singh, is using automation to generate rate information, 'fast forwarding automation that I thought was going to happen years ago, but it's taken a little bit longer.'
Alfonso Quijano, CEO of Lean Solutions, introduced StudioQ. TalentQ is the first application under the StudioQ set of AI-driven solutions that Quijano said give its customers an 'unprecedented level of visibility to access talent.' It also aids in the onboarding process 'from start to finish, ensuring your new hire is fully prepared to thrive in their role,' Quijano said.
Greenscreens.ai CEO Dawn Favier, fresh off the company's announced planned acquisition by Triumph Capital (NASDAQ: TFIN), said her company will be adding an AI-driven product, Intuition. 'Pricing long-term freight contracts has always been a major challenge in the freight industry,' she said. Using AI and drawing on historical data, Intuition will build market forecasts on lanes out to 12 months in advance, greatly speeding up a broker's ability to respond to a longer-term RFP as opposed to the spot market.
Happy Robot is rolling out Bridge, 'a control panel to run the operations across your entire business,' Catherine Dean said in presenting the product. Bridge, she said, 'is like a connection point between your teams and your businesses, shared knowledge and task execution.'
Steve Kochan of HaulPay discussed his company's financing activities, which involve factoring and payments among other services, with a special focus on fighting fraud. He was presenting at Media Day because of the first update of the company's app and user interface in more than six years.
Among the presentations by so many new companies was a veteran: Infinity Software Solutions, a TMS provider in business for 25 years. CEO Josh Asbury said the company was taking a 'big swing' in introducing WorkerOS, which he described as 'unifying all the different data, all the different data streams that workers have, the different data pipelines, into a common pool of data.'
Another veteran company that presented was McLeod Software. Its new AI product is MPact.RespondAI. It was described as McLeod's first AI solution, and its functionality is targeted at what already looks like a crowded field: processing voluminous levels of all types of communication.
Rose Rocket's TMS has added its own human-named feature, Ted, to its TMS.AI system, which was introduced earlier this year. It's another entry into the battle for cleaning up communications like emails that pour into brokerages every day. 'You get reduced time spent on manual entry by up to 20%, and new users of Rose Rocket will onboard onto our system 70% faster,' field marketing manager Neena Salifu said of Ted.
David Ely, chief product officer at broker-focused Tai Software, used the word 'flexibility' to describe his company's new offering, which was introduced at the TIA. Tai believes, Ely said, that brokers are 'forced to work around preset work flows, fixed fields, static period logic, and it makes true automation impossible without costly development.' The flexibility he said is being built into Tai will 'let them define their business rules, trigger automated workloads and adapt the platform to fit their unique operations.'
Michael Davidian, the vice president of business operations at TrueNorth, introduced Loadie, its 'virtual dispatcher' that takes information posted to the company's load board and seeks to use AI to match it with a carrier. 'Our AI doesn't just wait,' Davidian said. 'It works to match loads with quality carriers in real time, and the broker can specify what type of carriers match to that broker's load. This can be based on authority compliance criteria, past relationships with that broker and a variety of other customizable factors.'
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The post Breaking from the FreightTech AI pack: Companies make their case at TIA meeting appeared first on FreightWaves.
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