81% of Freight Brokers are Faking Their AI Strategy

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0:56Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Welcome to What the Truck. I'm Thomas Wasson filling in for Malcolm. He's staying a little bit busy over here on the main stage, so they're putting me to work today. But it is day one at F3, the Future of Freight Festival. And before I dive in, we have a great show today. We'll be talking with the folks at Evos. Savos, we're talking about workforce solutions. Going to have a lot of good folks and lean solutions near the end, so going to be a really good conversation. Before we dive in, though, I'd like to give a shout-out to Salesforce. This is brought to you by Salesforce. It is the world's number one AI CRM.

1:28Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: It brings together people, AI agents, apps, and data onto one open, trusted platform. Transportation and logistics leaders rely on Salesforce to unify shipper data across sales, service, marketing, and supply chain operations. Over 18 ,000 companies already run on Agent Force by Salesforce. Supply chain and logistics is one of the fastest industries to ROI on AI agents. and supply chain and logistics companies average under seven months to positive ROI with Salesforce. Deliver agents 16 times faster and get a 75 % higher agent accuracy than DIY approaches with Salesforce. Salesforce helps every organization become a digentic enterprise where humans and AI agents drive customer success together.

2:11Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Learn more at salesforce.com slash transportation. Okay, got that out of the way here. Let's dive in. Let's get going here. Super excited to be talking with Yurov and the guys at Evos. You know, one of the things that as we're diving in here is that your best AI dispatcher can't be everywhere. This is going to be a fun topic. Before we dive in, though, tell me about yourself and your company. What are you working on?

2:32Leaders from Sivas: Absolutely. I'm Murav, the founder and CEO here at Evos. We really specialize in making every company operate like the best in the world, making AI and freight and supply chain accessible, fast and quick to deploy.

2:45Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: And so, you know, one of the big things is I used to be a dispatcher. So this is something near and dear to my heart. But, you know, when when your best dispatcher can only work on so many loads, what happens when their judgment is applied to everyone? That's one of the big conversations I hear. Let's talk about that.

3:02Leaders from Sivas: Absolutely. So, I mean, really tying it into our mission here of making every company the best it possibly could be with what they have. I think for us being a dispatcher yourself the judgment you have the pay books you had that work taking the best of what every person on your team has brought to the table and putting it into a system that can do that 24-7 multiplies the amount of work that can get done and the quality of it.

3:26Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: And one of the things is, you know, when we're looking at autonomous capture, you know, we're tying that into your best dispatcher. You know, how do you get that right judgment and workarounds? One of the things in trucking they talk about is tribal knowledge. How do you capture that essence?

3:42Leaders from Sivas: Absolutely. So we have two parts to this, quantitative and qualitative. I think a lot of companies stop at quantitative only looking at the data, what's happened, how people work, those emails. For us, we take it a step further. It's about understanding the person outside of the company too. We have an operator for us called Cody. You can think of it as the most obsessed person when it comes to speaking to you about your job. And Cody's an agent that simply talks about its job and your job and really goes deep for about an hour to two about what you do on a day-to-day basis. Really the premise of our qualitative data collection that lets us understand what you do, how you do it, and why you make it happen.

4:20Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: And one of the big things I used to deal with is exception management. And so when we're looking at that, you know, how do you tell the difference between like flagging it and then handling it? Because that's one of the large agent conversations I've had is you can do agents for everything, but how do you get that right combination for the exceptions?

4:38Leaders from Sivas: Yeah, it's a funny, funny stage. I mean, for us, it's really the difference comes with the execution there. Flagging, it's always been great. It comes back to your team. Then you have to take on that workload and get that done with us, with our operators. we simply go and take that further action on it and close it out bringing it back to the team

4:55Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: completed and so you know when we're looking at technology investment a lot of times mid-market brokers mid-market carriers uh there's definitely a size difference and so um you know how come it feels like a lot of the technology has skipped a lot of these i guess smbs or you know what's an smb nowadays but talk about that gap because it does seem like big guys well financed the rest the folks are operating on a patchwork.

5:21Leaders from Sivas: Yeah, I think it's been interesting, right? We've had this huge shift in technology when it comes to the sector. You've had the big companies of the world, the big ERPs, TMS systems, really go after the enterprise at a cost point and difficulty to implement that's just not accessible to the SMB. We really kind of pride ourselves on making ourselves quick, easy to adapt. You can get up and running with one hour, one day, and one month's results. And so that's really where we've come in to bring that to the SMB and mid-market that I feel like, in my experience, I've seen the neglect that's come to them when it comes to technology and access to it.

5:56Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Walk me through that timeline a little. Well, you know, one of the big things these operators, if I want to get an autonomous operator, go live, trust with real freight, real loads. What does that timeline look like? How quickly and what does the first deployment look like?

6:10Leaders from Sivas: Absolutely. We really pride ourselves on taking only 24 hours. I think for us, Speed to deployment and speed to ROI are very closely tied together. As a customer with us, you could simply sign up, spend an hour speaking to Cody. You'd spend three hours waiting for an operator to be developed. And within 24 hours, the operator's up running on top of your systems and getting work done the same way you would with a new hire. Oh, wow. So like 24 hours within a day. Within a day. You could wake up tomorrow morning and have this ready for FreightWaves if you'd like.

6:43Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Yeah. Well, better watch out. They'll try to go in for me if they're not careful. Host agent. Strike that from the record. But when we're looking at the decisions, one of the big questions, of course, is what can I hand off to an AI? What can I let a human do? What are you kind of hearing and what are you recommending with folks as you guys are working with customers?

7:02Leaders from Sivas: Yeah, I think there's a lot of work that needs capacity right now, particularly in the SMB market, especially given labor and how hard it is to actually attract and retain labor within the market. And so for us, really indexing on what we can do to support existing teams to increase that capacity, thinking really, you know, we've named our platform Workhorse to be the workhorse for the workforce, and that's exactly what we want to do.

7:29Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: With workflows, so I wish I had an AI agent when I dispatched. You know, as folks are kind of starting out, let's talk about concrete examples for an operator taking over a workflow. What are some good examples on that? What should we be thinking about passing off? What's a good candidate?

7:47Leaders from Sivas: Yeah, absolutely. I think it goes across the stack. I think my favorite example for us is our LTL operator with My Freight World. That for us saw extreme success very quickly. I think as you know, LTL Freight's been increasing rapidly over the last couple of years. Now firms really dedicating themselves to it. And with that uptake, I've got a lot of BDO employees coming in to handle that audit flow. You know, operating across 15, 16, 17, even, you know, 30 plus different carrier portals, manually checking invoices and sorting out those disputes and discrepancies. For us, with MyFreightWorld, we implemented the EVOS operator in 24 hours.

8:23Leaders from Sivas: Within five weeks, we got them to a point of 97 % autonomy. So now all of their LTL freight is being run by our operators, saving them about$600 ,000 a month in discrepancies from those audit flows.

8:38Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: So the agents could kind of read through these bills of late. Because that's what someone told me about LTL. It's like, you got the bills? I'm like, what are you talking about? There's like 12, you know, there's a whole lot of bills in every single one. So that's one of the great use cases you mentioned was validating, verifying as the bills matching. So that's just a very good practical.

8:53Leaders from Sivas: We can take it further and actually go and do the dispute management too and get everything closed out as it should and back to your financial team.

9:00Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Oh, crap. So when we're looking at more examples as well for folks who are, you know, companies worried about losing its best people, we kind of tied into your best dispatcher can only cover so many loads um you know what are some good practical examples because i think that's one of the bigger challenges as well as how do you get the organization on board and how do you get that best dispatcher to be like hey

9:23Leaders from Sivas: tell me the 23 herbs and spices yeah it's a great great question i think i mean my first answer is going to be use evos of course but uh coming back to it otherwise i think a lot of it's just around you know you have a lot of people retiring out of the industry i think the proper management of how are you capturing what they know, transferring those relationships over to the younger, newer employees within the team as they retire out has been a big, important part of working with our customers, too, helping that change management process in the recruiting chain, as well as making sure we can, of course, record and have that on track with EVOS as well.

9:57Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Do you ever have processes? I'm going to flip the script a little bit. Are there ever any processes as you're having conversations with customers that they're like, I definitely want to have a person on compared to a lot of the low-hanging fruit. Is there kind of like a tier in terms of what to hand off for sure? And then what to keep in-house but augment?

10:14Leaders from Sivas: Yeah, so we actually have tiers by that exact scope, right? We've got some operators that are covering tasks, really simple things that really just want to get off our hands. You've got operators covering entire role scopes and doing things like dispatching or scheduling. And you have operators that take over functions that really handle the entire audit process that's required there. or they come in and actually run the dispatch operations or your entire load sourcing there as well. So we really want to vary ourselves by that scope. We typically start with a task and a role and then move towards a function, pretty much putting them together.

10:47Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Let's talk looking ahead as well as we're moving through. AI agents in the supply chain we've had in the past, what, one year now it feels like? When did agents come out? Is it in the past year or two years now? It's been maybe three or four on the tech world. That's what I feel like. Everything's compressing. So as we're looking ahead, right now, AI agents in the supply chain, being a founder, working in a company, what are you most excited about? What are you thinking in the next 6 to 12 months that you think folks need to put on their radar?

11:16Leaders from Sivas: Yeah, I really think it's moving away from workflows. I have to say, we really have this ethos, both on the product and commercial side, that we want to ignore workflows. I think, as a dispatcher, how much of the work did you do? Did you feel like could fall under a very static workflow? I like to describe workflows as instruction manuals for agents and unfortunately instruction manuals don't tend to work in this industry and they tend to be wrong a lot of the time and when it comes to the vast amount of edge cases being handled they can't be solved either. And so for us, our focus away from workflows on what the role really is and what outcome the customer really wants lets us get to these AI agents or operators that we call actually doing and covering that entire scope from end to end without having the human in the loop 24-7.

12:01Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Do you guys ever, one of the other things is agent to agent communication. I had a conversation about EDI one time. Like, well, what if my agent talks to your agent and then they just start screeching at each other or something? Like, you know, is that one of the things looking ahead is as more companies are adopting Agentec AI and providers for their platform, it used to be with APIs. Do you guys ever have to, I guess it's called an MCP. Do you guys have to start learning to how my agents need to also communicate with maybe other agents? What if the shipper has an agent, a broker, you know, all the agents are, is that one of the interesting challenges?

12:31Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: That's absolutely there as well.

12:33Leaders from Sivas: We're actually releasing a feature called Evos Connect that actually connects a lot of our customers in manufacturing, F &B and retail to our carriers or broker partners in logistics and transportation. So that any loads you're doing for that manufacturing firm is actually being run by the agent on their side and the agent on your side. And your team no longer has to worry about that relationship or handling anything in between there either.

12:57Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Final thoughts as well as wrapping it up. Practical advice. So a lot of listeners and stuff and folks are going to be checking this out. They're learning about agents. They're getting to see the use cases. What's some good practical first steps? Because I think that we mentioned the SMBs earlier, the small to midsize brokers, carriers, and shippers. What should they do? Because I feel like there's a lot of overwhelming. What's some good concrete first steps?

13:17Leaders from Sivas: Yeah, I mean, the first and the hardest part is figuring out where to deploy, right? What's really going to give me the highest ROI with the least amount of change management and the lowest amount of cost? I mean again to really toot our own home we're still offering everybody who's come to F3 and Freight Waves this week our discovery for free. That process is really an hour of your time across your team and from that process we can identify exactly where to deploy, how to deploy, and in what order and in three to four hours after that if you'd like have those systems up running and working on top of your stack.

13:49Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Final question if folks want to learn more what's the best way to get more info? Yeah do find us at getEVOS.AI. Perfect thanks for your time man.

13:56Leaders from Sivas: Thank you so much, fellas. All right.

13:59Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: We're moving along. Oh, yeah, yeah. Here you go. Oh, you want a picture together? Let's do it. Let's get a photo. We got two minutes in transition. Here we go. Here we go. No, thank you. Appreciate it, man. All right. We are moving along here. We're going to be bringing on our next guest, Jay Singh, Chief Operating Officer at Cevos. We're going to be talking about logistics and workforce solutions in the age of AI. There's a lot of stuff in AI. Welcome, sir. I feel we're so far away. All right, let's go. Let's get started here. First off, tell us a little about yourself and what you guys are working on.

14:35Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Let's get warmed up.

14:37Thomas Wasson: Jay Singh. We're working significantly in the BPO space. Talk about myself. I started my career a long time ago as a computer science graduate from Georgia State, working at IBM, working into trucking. And then I ran into Michael McClary, who's my co-founder at Sivos. He was running in circles in UPS and Amazon in India while I was running tactical sort of operations for myself, for my own companies in India as a back end. And then we connected and quietly started working on a lot of stuff. Last year we did a soft launch. We've grown to about 225 people and after growing to 225 people, today's our platform, kicking it off, making it official and ready to talk to many, many, many people.

15:37Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Well, you guys mentioned a boutique BPO. Talk about that. What does it mean in like a day to day to folks who aren't as familiar with that term?

15:45Thomas Wasson: Yeah. So what does boutique really mean? Boutique means, can we cater to a customer? Does a customer have to fit in our box? Or we build a box for the customer that the customer seems fit. So think about it. We walk into a customer, day one, we understand their SOPs. We get them onboarded. We outsource the roles. Then we understand the roles. We put KPIs around them. And then we augment the roles further into eventually automating the roles where they're ideally fit for automation.

16:23Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Yeah. And, you know, that brings also, you know, when we're looking at, you're bringing when the team's not on the customer's payroll, but how do you keep the quality, the accountability, you know, how do you get that kind of interplay and handle that dynamic?

16:35Thomas Wasson: That's an excellent question. You know, 225 people report to me. However, I report to every single one of my customers. Without our customers, we're not nowhere. So how do we? Transparency. Sivo's Insights is a tool we use where all the actions taken by a staffer are visible to the company. Through Sivo's Insight, we can actually connect with your Tableau, whatever your reporting system is. so you see exactly what the productivity is happening with every single staffer at the grassroots level.

17:11Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: I like that because that builds into the coaching, the development, the management. One of the challenges is some folks, they think it's just plug and play when there's still that other challenge of making sure they understand the organization's unique culture and processes.

17:24Thomas Wasson: Absolutely. We have to embed within the culture. We have to understand every company is going to be different, right? So when we're talking to company XYZ, which is, let's say, a broker, their needs are different than what a carrier's needs are. But the KPIs with which manage has to meet the culture of the company. And it becomes very important to embed ourselves and be transparent. And we've had a customer, I'll give you a real-life example. We went to a customer and we said, you don't need these three roles out of the 20 you've given us. And they pushed back and they said, why? They said, let me actually put a couple people just as floaters to sit over here and they won't do any work.

18:11Thomas Wasson: And I promise you, a workflow would not break. Three weeks later, we were able to save those three roles out of the 20 roles. But that also builds the trust with the customer where they trusted us with more.

18:24Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: I like the workforce development angle because, you know, a lot of times organizations will ask for things. They don't even know what they want, though. So when we're looking at how does, you know, Civoos different from a regular nearshoring operation, you know, that's one of the differentiators is just knowing the workflows, knowing the customer, and then being able to say, yeah, you don't need as much. Or is that one of the big competitive advantages?

18:44Thomas Wasson: That's a huge competitive advantage, right? So first of all, we're not just outsourcing to outsource and add headcount and headache to a customer. We're outsourcing to improve the process, to augment it, and then eventually, hopefully, automate with many of the functions.

19:02Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: And let's talk about as well, when we're outsourcing to places like Asia and Europe, catch folks up on that as well. I had a startup that had a European outsource team, so I got to work with some Hungarians. and talk about some of those big trends as well, because I think that's one of the interesting things that doesn't get talked enough are the opportunities and the geographies.

19:20Thomas Wasson: Yeah, so that's a really important question that you ask. I think when you look at the transportation space in U.S., it's a mix. You've got some Punjabis running freight. You've got some Serbians running freight. We've got a couple beachheads, one in India, one in Serbia. And it is, of course, at the backbone, We're right here in the U.S. based out of Atlanta. It is important to be able to meet the customer where the need is. So when it comes to trucking companies or new authorities or carrier sales, roles like that, it is important to be able to communicate in several different languages. So we were able to, of course, English being the first, English, Spanish, Serbian, Punjabi, Hindi, Haryanavi.

20:05Thomas Wasson: We're able to communicate in several different languages with the customers depending on what the needs are.

20:10Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: And I like that aspect as well because each location as you're building, you're building talent on both ends. So you're having the workforce development we talked about earlier with the KPIs and stuff, but then that provides the opportunity to help multiple customers, multiple clients, so you find the right fit.

20:25Thomas Wasson: Come again, sorry. Oh, yeah.

20:27Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: So I wanted to switch gears a little bit as well. As we finished with Asia and Europe, one of the things you're talking about is AI. So, you know, we've got traditional methods and then we've got automation and workflow automation. Have you seen any big changes with that? Talk to us more about that.

20:44Thomas Wasson: Huge changes. I think the world is changing every single day. I think we can be living in a better time in history as automation and AI agents are happening. We remain technology agnostic. We want to be able to meet the customer where they are, work with them on what technology platforms they have. And at the end of the day, we want to basically hand over the work to them rather than control what technology they're going to use. So whether they're on an open source model or a closed source is entirely up to the customer. And I can speak for this for hours if you want me to, and I'll bore the heck out of you.

21:24Thomas Wasson: whether they want to have their own server on site, whether they want several different ways to develop the tech. But at the end of the day, we're a worker as a service, so we want to be able to just get to that automation and then help the customer basically just pay a transaction fee for every transaction that happens and keep it super clean from that standpoint.

21:49Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Tying into that, dive into that a little more, is one of the challenges with customers when we hear about automation and then workflow as well. You alluded to earlier the challenges of knowing your own workflow. What are some of the big things you want to encourage folks when we're looking at, hey, I want to look at automation. I want to look at nearshoring. What do you recommend to get started on how to kind of digest that within their operations? Is it one or the other? Does it depend on the role? Or what's some practical advice for folks who are kind of interested in it?

22:15Thomas Wasson: I think we've got to take a very consultative approach to every role, right? You bring on a role. You study it for the first 30 days. You get it onboarded. You understand the SOPs. Then you basically start building KPIs around that. You capture the SOPs into some level of augmentation. And really repetitive, monotonous work is the first one that gets automated. Within our company, where we're doing SDR work right now, we've got AI developed to help the agents that are doing calling out to the customers with scripted calling and on-the-go AI tutoring to improve the quality of the output.

22:57Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: And, you know, when a freight company brings on a Sivu steam, what is the first 60 to 90 days? We mentioned the 30, so talk us through the timelines here. What is it? How does it feel for the people inside of the company? Walk us through a process. All right.

23:15Thomas Wasson: Day, week one, we'll start week one, and go all the way to day 90. Week one, we're walking in. We're capturing what roles we're going to do. Week two, we're going to study those deeply, build the SOPs, get the SOPs from the customers, start understanding those. By day 30, we've got a person sitting in a seat doing the role.

23:40Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: You had a point earlier you were talking about that you could go into more detail. I think as we're getting back on track here, one of the big things is what to automate, what not to automate, what to nearshore, what not to nearshore. You brought up a great example of it during the 30, 60, and 90 days. You're working with the clients, figuring out those roles. Do you see any trends, any larger trends in the space that folks are deciding to move more towards automated or agentic or move more towards humans? What are you kind of seeing and hearing?

24:10Thomas Wasson: So the trend I'm seeing and what we're seeing is super monotonous, robotic, repetitive work is the first one that gets automated. Call it track and trace where you're collecting PODs, you're collecting BOLs, they're getting scanned in for processing of payment or going to accounting. That stuff is getting automated really, really fast and it should. What doesn't get automated is carrier negotiation, building relationships, SDR roles. And there's no place right now for automation on that. But a proposal going to a customer after a sales rep has spoken to a customer can get automated and can be done in real time rather than waiting until the end of the day for somebody to get the work done and cross all the T's, dot all the I's.

25:02Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Do you ever find companies struggling to kind of define the tasks? Because that's one of the cool themes I'm hearing more is allow humans to do the more human work, automate the more automated to the agent work. Is there ever any challenge getting these folks to talk about what do they need? Or like, you know, you got to watch them for like a few days just to even see any surprises on that.

25:22Thomas Wasson: Yeah, that's interesting. So I ran a trucking company. I had and that's how Michael and I met many years ago. and I was running a trucking company. You can't, there's a lot of companies out there. There still are really, really repetitive work doing Google Sheets and things like that. And you go to them and say, let's automate day one. It doesn't make sense. You have to bring the customer along for the journey, right? So day one, you have to be able to say, okay, what can we just augment? What can we teach your staff with coaching tools? And then before we just start talking about automation, And I think on the large scale, there's companies that basically have put these measures.

26:06Thomas Wasson: They're like, oh, we have to adopt AI. We have to adopt AI. Without having a really clear picture of what they want to automate and by what time and how they want to automate and what the cost of that is going to be, we're going to give you a full picture on that.

26:23Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: That was one of my favorite ones on AI use. I talked with the Associate for Supply Chain Management, and they're like, CEOs, 80%, we got to have AI. They asked the first director level, 17%, understand what they need to do. Like, you know, when we're looking at kind of looking ahead as well in this age of AI, is that one of the challenges is as I'm a company, I need to pick the right partner, the right vendor to help me go through that journey? Because I'll be honest, I used to work on a Google spreadsheet as a dispatcher. I would be very scared. I'm like, do I need a TMS? Can I automate my spreadsheet?

26:51Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: I barely know how to work my spreadsheet. Is that one of the challenges?

26:53Thomas Wasson: That is one of the challenges. I've actually seen a challenge where a customer was using a Google spreadsheet, Google sheet, and one person was deleting a record and it was throwing everything in a tailspin. I mean, that was not too long ago. That was one year ago. And today, that same similar customer is working through a very creative flow of what, like, you know, for a life of a load on what a life of a load looks like, right? If you think about a life of a load, you've been a former dispatcher, right? So you basically, from load booking all the way to rate con, to collecting a POD, POL, tracking it.

27:35Thomas Wasson: You get to chunk every single piece of it and see what can be automated better depending on the need of the customer. We can automate the whole cycle. There are many people in this room that could do that. But how do you actually meet the customer where they are and what they want to automate is the critical portion to it.

27:54Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Kind of when you're hearing and having conversations with customers, you had a great example on the different tech levels. Do you experience as you're talking with folks when we're looking, especially in the context of nearshoring, do you hear maybe more of them doing the nearshoring? Or are they actually wanting to do more agentic AI? Or is this kind of like a parallel race? Or, you know, what are you kind of seeing for that? Because I think that's a fascinating challenge is I've worked with some great nearshoring operations teams. But in the age of AI, do you ever think there's like the FOMO?

28:24Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Is that one or can it be both?

28:25Thomas Wasson: I think there should be multiple, right? You're going to have diversity in thought process, diversity in growth. And so we follow the sun model, right? So when it's nighttime over here, 11 p.m. here, it's 930 in the morning in India. So somebody's waking up, what is the challenge for a customer? Finding an overnight person, doing tracking and tracing while the warehouse is open at 4 a.m.? You're also putting quality of life in your workers, right? Your staff over here. And then Eastern Europe, Serbia particularly, helps us fill the middle gap. And then if you follow the sun and then you add a Gentic on top of it, you cover every single part of the spectrum.

29:14Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Do you see a lot of folks use for after hours operations? Or that's one of the things I think for listeners is, what should I start targeting first as a practical first step for folks listening?

29:24Thomas Wasson: So the city we're based out in Chandigarh in India sort of wakes up at 5.30 in the evening because everybody is going to work at a contact center. And the city goes to sleep around 3 a.m. when everybody gets off work. so after hours is an easy one for a customer to trust us on right day one but we can do it all we we we would love to take on from after hours take on reduce some of the headache from the customer and then go into main hours main shift hours which are being 8 a.m to 5 p.m eastern that's what we consider all our staff always works on east coast time so you're never having to explain to them what time they're having a meeting or what time the delivery is.

30:11Thomas Wasson: Everybody's on EST.

30:13Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Looking ahead as well, we've had a great conversation about not only you guys being a boutique BPO, but looking at, you know, just helping out with operations. What gets you excited? Being in the game, having your own trucking company, what's on the next 6 to 12 months? For folks listening, what do you want to leave with folks? What gets you excited on? What are you excited about?

30:31Thomas Wasson: Man, I wake up every morning excited about solving customer problems. There's so many. And then excited about working with a great team like our SVP of customer solutions, our founders, our great team. And really, I mean, we're nothing without our customers. When I get on calls with customers, nothing more exciting. Hey, what challenge can I fix for you? What can I fix for you today?

30:55Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Jay, really appreciate your time as well. If folks want to learn more, because, you know, I've had a good conversation as well. We made it through the technical difficulties. Congratulations. But if folks want to learn more about it, get in touch, see what you guys are working on. what is the best way to find out more?

31:08Thomas Wasson: Jay at Sivos.ai. It's Jay at Sivos.ai. We're Sivos.ai, our website. Our LinkedIn is Sivos. And we would love to engage. We're here for one more day. We would love to stay engaged with all of you guys. I'm going to be walking around in the room. Find me. Ask me as many questions as you want to. I'll introduce them to Tom, our SVP of Customer Solutions. and we're here to answer any questions.

31:37Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Beautiful. Appreciate your time, man. Thank you. Here we go. I'll snag that for you. I'll lay it down. All right. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks again. All right. We're bringing our last but not least. Oh, I have to give one more ad read. I feel like I'm like Norm MacDonald here. Before I introduce you, this is brought to you by Salesforce. This edition of What the Truck. Shout out to our sponsor, Salesforce. I'm going to read the whole thing. so you're going to bear with me. Salesforce is the world's number one AICRM. It brings together people, AI agents, apps, and data on one open, trusted platform.

32:13Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Transportations and logistics leaders rely on Salesforce to unify shipper data across sales, service, marketing, and supply chain operations. Over 18 ,000 companies already run on AgentForce by Salesforce. Supply chain and logistics is one of the fastest industries on ROI for AI agents. Supply chain and logistics companies average under seven months to positive ROI with Salesforce. Deliver agents 16 times faster and get 75 % higher agent accuracy than DIY approaches with Salesforce. Salesforce helps every organization become an agentic enterprise where humans and AI agents drive customer success together.

32:47Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Learn more at salesforce.com slash transportation. All right. We did it. We're here. We are here. It's F3. It's day one. I'm still hanging in there. But, Danny, I'm excited to be chatting with you as well. Likewise. Before we dive in, tell us a little about yourself. Tell us about Lean and then we'll just start rocking and rolling.

33:08Leaders from Evos: Yeah, so I'm Danny Frisco. I'm SVP of growth at Lean Solutions Group. Recently came over, so I've been here three months. Formally founded a company called Rapid Health Solutions Group. We're a competitor to Lean, so we just came over via acquisition.

33:24Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: And so, you know, one of the big things is I actually had a good one on that first question. I mentioned earlier the challenges with AI adoption. You know, tell us more about the adoption and why isn't it, you know, why isn't it translating into that kind of transformation? Because that's like one of the big questions right now.

33:42Leaders from Evos: Yeah, it's interesting, right? And we just went live with Everest Group, put out a really cool report for us and we have some numbers. So we had 69 % of businesses have kind of started on their AI journey. So they're maybe past the pilot stage on into production. the issue that we've seen so far is about only 19 % of those businesses have actually redesigned their workflows for AI. So I think part of the issue is today, AI is such a buzzword in the industry, and there's so many point solutions out there that it demos really well, and people jump into it a little too soon. Our approach is you have to build the foundation first.

34:30Leaders from Evos: You have to get the data right. You have to get the SLPs right. You have to get the workforce management right. The re-skilling and up-skilling of our employees, of your employees, of what we called experts in the loop. And I think that part is missing right now. A lot of people just think, hey, we can plug it in. We can turn it on. We can get the agents going. And great, we've automated it. And no more work to be done. And I think that couldn't be farther from the truth so far.

34:58Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: I feel like I got to add a little bit of a joke. It's like baby proofing your house. Is your organization AI proofed? And then you wonder why your organization's covered in bruises as you're trying to adopt it. That was one of the big challenges. I guess big organizations don't even know what they want on a good day. So before you decide to do the AI transformation, you need to make sure that you know exactly how your little ducks in a row.

35:19Leaders from Evos: There has to be a plan, right? It should be a quarterly plan. That should evolve into a yearly plan. And companies who want to be around for a long time have to say, what does our company look like in five years, 10 years? How long will this transformation take? How are we going to do it? What types of people do we need to help us out and get there? So there's a lot going on for sure.

35:46Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Let's talk about humans as well. Where does human expertise remain crucial? As AI is speeding things up, where do the humans fit in to make sure it works?

35:54Leaders from Evos: Yeah, so humans are critical in the industry. I think our industry is built on exceptions. Before founding Rapido and then moving into lean, I spent about 10 years in logistics on the carrier sales side. So I saw it firsthand. Relationships are important. Problem solving is important. High judgment is important. And at the end of the day, customers and drivers sometimes just want a human. They want the empathy from the human, right? So I think they're a critical piece. They will never not be a critical piece in our industry. I think what AI does really well is take some of those low-level tasks, those tier one tasks, whether it be data entry, check calls here and there, document collection, and frees up the human to do more high-level work, right?

36:44Leaders from Evos: To work on the claims, to work on building relationships with their carriers, securing more capacity, things like that.

36:53Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: In your conversations with customers and your experience, what is kind of the biggest thing holding back freight companies as they're trying to scale AI?

37:01Leaders from Evos: Biggest things holding them back today are, I mean, I think there's a number. We could probably list quite a few, right? We got some time. Lay a few on me. We'll have plenty of time. I think the most important things that we've seen are, again, and I go back to data, not just data accessibility, clarity, a well-defined even data strategy. Some companies that I've seen in the past, data is messy. It doesn't talk to each other. There's no data warehouse involved. So it's getting the data right to start, and then it's really fine-tuning your SOPs. Unfortunately, sometimes in the industry, an SLP is do what Danny does.

37:50Leaders from Evos: Follow what Danny does. That can work to a certain extent, but the logic isn't there. And it's always redefining those processes. Okay, this works today. Will it work tomorrow? Who knows? But we should constantly audit those and make sure that they're, we call it AI readiness, right? You need to get the company and the business ready to implement AI, and I think that's extremely important. So without that step, skipping directly into AI, it can be kind of a disaster.

38:24Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Well, one of the other disasters, you've got to measure and figuring out the right measures, the right KPIs. Talk about that because I think you had a great point. Do what this one guy does. Well, what does that one guy do to the KPI? How do you implement that? How are you going to get the ROI? That's one of the challenges. What are you thinking in terms of for folks listening, how should they be able to measure it and figure out if it is working? What's some good practical advice?

38:49Leaders from Evos: Yeah, and I will say a cool thing about what we do at Lean Solutions Group is we go in and help our customers along the entire way. So we go out and build those KPIs that are important, build those processes that are extremely important, and then constantly evolve them. So if I'm just looking at AI from what is the impact in the business today, you're going to look at things like hours saved, tasks completed. We look at AI as the life of the load, right? So from the tender coming over via EDI or API until we invoice and close out the load and everything in between. and there's bits of pieces that AI can really do well, really automate with a high efficiency too.

39:37Leaders from Evos: You're looking at 95 % above kind of being correct. And then there's other areas where you don't want AI to touch, right? Maybe not for a while, maybe not for a couple years. And going through that process and really outlining, this is what a shipment looks like for our company. This is where AI does really well. and this is where the expert in the loop fits in and can still take care of those issues.

40:04Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Do you ever find that organizations may kind of struggle to answer that question as well? What should the human, what should the AI, what should I let control go over? Is that ever a challenge on that change management side?

40:17Leaders from Evos: Absolutely. I'd argue it's one of the biggest challenges because it's all new. No one's ever done it before. It's hard to find someone who's had a very successful rollout and gone through those steps correctly to come out of the other side. So everyone's trying to reinvent how that works. And again, I think that's where Lean comes in and does a really good job. We can be those AI integration kind of process mapping data integrity experts where maybe you don't have that at your company today. You don't have a robust IT team. You don't have a bunch of developers that can go in and custom develop tools for your company.

41:00Leaders from Evos: So that's where I think our support is really compelling right now with what we're offering.

41:05Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: So looking ahead, how can freight companies turn human and AI collaboration? How can we make that a real advantage? Because as everyone's getting this AI, how do you keep the thing that makes you unique? without, you know, it's got to be a tricky thing. That's got to be a hard needle to thread.

41:21Leaders from Evos: Yeah, it's extremely tricky. And I will say the best companies in the future will have the best blends of both, in my opinion. They'll do AI extremely well, but they'll never lose sight of the people. They'll have the people trained up, skilled, and can interact with AI much like nothing we've seen in the market today. And that's what we're bringing to life.

41:47Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: And looking ahead, are there any early examples that you can tell or with customers as well? What does this new hybrid future look like or any food for thought as folks are trying to wrap their head around this paradigm shift?

41:59Leaders from Evos: Yeah, so I encourage everyone to come to the demo tomorrow. 11.45 for those of you who are here will demonstrate some workflows. But really good question, right? So a workflow example that I think is really centered towards AI that AI does really well is document collection today. You know, proof of delivery, you call, the carrier sends back the proof of delivery, the AI can scan the document, check it, signatures are there, time in, time out, good to go, auto approve it, no need for a human at all. And then you imagine a claim comes in, right? A trailer got caught on fire. There's going to be a claim.

42:45Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: That's happened to me a few times. I have burned a few trailers in my past.

42:47Leaders from Evos: I have scars from those conversations, for sure. So that is an area where we still want a human involved. And then it is very client-specific, right? So clients can come in and say, listen, I'm okay with the document collection. But, for example, if the tension is off, if they're charging me more for detention than what is in our contract, flag it to a human. I don't want AI solving that solution just yet. We still want a human involved. So it'll scan the document, see kind of the difference in the in and out times, and then kick it over to a human on our Agent Edge software. and essentially say, hey, Danny, double check this document, make sure we're good to go.

43:36Leaders from Evos: And then I can go in and ask our decision intelligence, what's the best route forward? What do we do? And then I can close that out myself. Over time, maybe I close so many of those out that the AI says, hey, Danny, this has happened a bunch. We've learned enough. Now we can take that over. And the client finally says, OK, you've given me enough examples. we're good let's pack that away on ai only and then let's tackle some other workflows i feel

44:03Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: like you helped an accounts receivable person get off their blood pressure meds because i'm assuming another example with documents i always saw the ar folks they're like have you paid me yet

44:11Leaders from Evos: have you paid me yet another good example possibly yeah absolutely so collections important uh ar those are also you know very ripe for ai right now last thoughts as well looking ahead we are

44:26Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: we mentioned a new hybrid role, humans and machines working together. Is there ever as we're looking ahead, do I have to like train my own AI agents to be polite to the other agents? Because having worked in logistics, you and I have both, it can get a little spicy sometimes. Is that one of the future states is not only you want to have a provider to help AI augment it, but then our AI is working well with the other customers' AI as we're all, you know, navigating this new world. Yeah.

44:52Leaders from Evos: You might be asking the wrong guy because I like the spiciness. I like a little healthy conflict, so I'm not opposed to having my agents push a little within boundaries. I would say what we're most excited about at Lean Solutions Group is going through this transformation with our clients and being there to support them as a partner. we think the industry is drastically going to change in the next two to four years, especially with AI and humans and how they work together, how they work separately. And we're just really excited about what we can have to offer. Well, Danny, really appreciate your time.

45:32Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Excited to see your demo tomorrow as well. Yeah, you'll be there, right? Oh, always. One miss for the world. Unless they have me out here on stage again. You'll have to send me a copy. Pleasure. Appreciate it, man. Always a pleasure. Shout out to Lean Solutions as well. And we're wrapping it up. We're going to keep on rolling. We've got some great content coming up after What the Truck. So coming up shortly, we'll have some more fireside chats. You don't want to miss it. We'll have one more as well. So absolute pleasure. Thank you all so much. This is a wrap for What the Truck. I'll see you again soon.

46:04Leaders from Lean Solutions Group: Take care.

46:20Outro Music