Came back with a bank window down yelling now money anything hey oh got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when I'm get to the back hey Got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when the lane moving fast hey Let them all cross if they hate then let them made them make a bigger balls.
Hey what is up, ladies and gentlemen? We are back. We are live. It is a freight Coach podcast, the top podcast in transportation, coming to you guys every single weekday, 8:30am Pacific, 10:30 Central, to break down some industry headlines. But most importantly, you guys provide some actual insight into what you can do with all of this information. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome. This is the real SATA Freight, ladies and gentlemen. And I say that before every single show.
And what I mean by that is I only speak with transportation professionals because at the end of the day, you guys, I want to talk to the right individuals who have done what you're looking to do or who are currently doing what you're trying to achieve, so you can take that information, apply it, utilize it, and see a meaningful difference in your business and your life. Happy Thursday, everybody. I got a very special guest. I'm going to bring him up very quickly, and we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics, and that's technology inside of transportation. And are we at a crossroads right now? Are things being overplayed? What's actually going on out there? And this guy is literally the most qualified person to talk about it because he literally interviews everyone who's involved in this.
So with that being said, I got my good friend Eric Johnson with the JOC back on the show. Eric, thank you so much for joining me.
Hey, Chris, it's always a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me back.
Now, man, I love having you on the show because, like, you are out there talking to anyone and everyone inside of the Logitech space. And you know, you've been doing Logitech now for how many years at this point?
I. I do not want to admit anymore. I think I started somewhere around 2010, 2011. So it's going on, like 15 years now. I've been covering it, which seems insane.
But, dude, it's like, it's. It's been. I think it was like 2017 is when I started really paying attention to the Logitech space, like, what's kind of coming in, what's needed, what's not. And, you know, there's been a complete transformation out there across the industry. And, you know, obviously mine Is, you know, domestic truckload is where a lot of my experiences and, you know, I'm out there. I follow you probably more than any other journalist inside of the industry, what you're writing out there. And it's like, I, I just, I feel like it, you know, this year is going to be, it's going to be interesting to see what happens is.
It just is it just going to be all AI everything and now people are just going to rebrand everything AI because it seems like that's just all anybody wants to talk about in every industry across the board.
I cannot deny I'm sort of guilty of this myself. I've written a few AI articles in the past few months, especially around freight brokerage. And I mean, I just did one on project AI article on project logistics. We have a bunch of AI sessions at our event coming up in a few weeks. So I take the position of, let me try to help people who have absolutely no background or understanding of what AI is, just whether it applies or not to their life. I try not to fan the flames of the hype. I try to, okay, if it applies to you. If it doesn't, don't worry about it. That's sort of my general theory on this. But in terms of how much AI is like, occupying people's attention, I will say I had.
There was a VC that I talked to who's very supply chain focused and was like, I was like, oh, I'm starting to see some new funding rounds for companies again. And he's like, yeah, still pretty unusual to see one that's not AI related. Almost everything is AI related in terms of early stage funding.
So it's wild because it's like, I was talking to a buddy of mine, he's the chief Technology officer, he demos literally every piece and he's like, he has a running joke out there with me. He's like, yeah, essentially now it's like what I've seen, the biggest shift is anything that has AI attached to it is just like a minimum of a $5,000 a month price tag that comes along with it. He's like, AI, five grand. AI, five grand. Like that. That's what he was joking. And he was just like, man. He's like, there's a lot of great tools that are out there, but it's just like, does your business actually need to invest in technology? And you know, like, again, I'm a massive fan of it as long as you can afford it.
I don't think that you go and throw everything in the kitchen sink at tech because as were saying before we jumped on all of my customers who I actively move freight with, all of my prospects who I am currently speaking to right now, not one of them have asked about that or even my tech stack, you know, like for the most part, like, can you actually send in trucks to get picked up on time? That's still the general consensus. So.
Okay, so this is an interesting point because I. One thing I've heard emerge as like a thought process for this over the last few months as AI seems to be everywhere is okay, like work backwards. We're sort of skipping steps.
Right.
Things look very shiny and as you say, they can be expensive. Work backwards. What are, what is the problem you're trying to solve? Can the problem be solved without technology at all? Probably no. Most people, if you're looking at a problem, you need something. Can the problem be solved with the technology that you were already invested in, I. E. Non AI front and center type technology? Probably. Maybe it gets you 90% of the way there. Okay, if it gets you 90% of the way there, is that good enough? Because extra 10% is going to cost X amount and then are you willing to spend that much, create that much upheaval to get that incremental improvement or is 90% of addressing the problem good enough? Most cases, yeah.
There's probably a piece of software that does something that by the way was built using some form of machine learning or AI. It's just, you don't have to worry about it. Why would you worry about how their product is built? Yeah, but that probably solves the problem without you going to, you know, a solution that is like, oh, it's too sophisticated. It's too, you know, because there's the two AI cases are. And I don't want to talk about AI, this whole. Yeah, I don't know, like, just to put it, just to like break it down as much as I can because I like, I'm not a technologist. Right. Like, I also need it. I need to be spoken to like a second grader so I can speak to other people like second graders. But the two like forks in the road.
The fork in the road is are you going to use something that was with like ChatGPT, like Generative AI, a bot that essentially replaces like data entry from one system into another or you know, extracts information from an email or auto sends an email response to a specific type of question. Then the other fork is the way trickier part, the optimization. Taking huge amounts of computation and just running things over and over way faster than a human can to figure out a really complicated problem. That's logistics, but it's also like, that's incredibly expensive to do that. And so unless the problem can't at all be solved by humans, or it's crazy expensive to solve it with humans, we're probably not yet at the stage where that makes sense for most companies because it's still really complicated and really confusing and really costly.
So yeah, I mean, honestly, my main thing is at this point is like, educate yourself as much as you can, as much as you have time and interest to educate yourself. But I would be really reticent to commit to a bunch of things right now because everything is like in flux. So.
Yeah, no, I'm right there with you. And you know, your article that you put out literally yesterday is, it's kind of like where my mind went on a lot of this, you know, because like, it's a lot of what I go through in my day to day is the product. Like, is the technology that you have, are your shippers even like a asking for it? Your customers, are they even asking for it? Or, or is it even doing a good enough job? And you know, it says the title of your article, shippers want more visibility data than terminals are providing. And you know, so like, what is it not is the visibility that's out there.
And again, we don't need to list off any company names or anything like that, but is the general census like, hey, yeah, you have visibility, but it's not good enough? And why, like, why are we paying for a service if it's not actually accomplishing what the end user really needs it for?
This particular story was based on a study that was done just to be clear on container terminals. Now you could probably do something, analog of this with chocolate terminals. You pick your type of terminal that you're dealing with in your mode. But this was container terminals. Basically what the study found was container terminals had. About 60% of them said they were doing a good to really good job of providing visibility milestones. The container has landed, the container has been offloaded, the container is available for pickup to shippers. Only a quarter of shippers said the same thing about the visibility they were getting from the terminals. Now the interesting thing with that is those two parties don't have a contractual relationship with each other. Yeah, the shipping, the container terminals have A really have a contractual relationship with the shipping lines.
The shippers have sometimes contractual relationship with the shipping lines, sometimes forwarders who have contractual. So they're like two layers, sometimes three layers removed from actually having a incentive, monetary incentive to do business with one another. And but there's this big disconnect like the terminals think they're giving better information than they're giving. The shippers think they're getting worse. So who's responsible? I don't want to pin this necessarily on the like the visibility providers. They're, they're at the mercy of the data that they can get access to. I think this survey sort of spoke to just sort of like the expectations on the shipper side are always going to be really high.
And the, and the companies, whether it's a truckload carrier shipping line, a broker container terminal, they have a somewhat of a responsibility to take what's going on when the cargo is in their hands and send information about it, accurate information, timely information so the shippers can make decisions on it. And that was what. To me the study was very interesting because it highlighted this huge gap between what the shippers think they need and what the terminals think they're providing.
Yeah, I'll always blame sales reps Eric, because sales.
Well yeah, that's true. They always over promise and yeah, no, I agree with you.
I, I think that's a lot of it, right? Is it's gonna boil down to it is this. I are people, do they have sky high expectations or they never think that they're being satisfied with it or is was there a sales rep like you know me back in the day who just said we could do literally everything.
Never say no, right? You never say no to anything.
You know I, I just look at it as you know, with where we're at, you know, as tech, as an industry, as things are starting to progress and everything. You know it's like I look at it as like a lot of my day to day it should be automated ultimately, right. Like there's a lot of back end stuff that like why am I doing this Time and time again and again we're pretty automated inside of my operation. But you know I look at it's like that's where operationally I want to automate, right? How do I save clicks, how do I auto send documents, how do I do a lot of that stuff? How do I even autorespond to quotes, right? You know just little things like that to save me time.
I just Think that there's, you know, what you actually need and what's out there. Dude, it's exhausting, right? Like, I, I see stuff literally every single day and I'm like, oh, that's cool, but do you actually need it? And, you know, I think more times than not, I would argue on the err, on the side of caution, I would say, about investing in certain things right now. Because again, does it make the driver experience with your brokerage better? Does it make the customer experience with your brokerage better? Or does it make it harder for them to actually communicate with people? Because that is still the ultimate denominator in every single transaction is communication. Are you actually answering when they need you to in a timely manner? And everything else, you know, if you can't unequivocally say 100% yes every single time.
I don't know, man. Like, I'm, I, maybe I'm naive. Maybe I'm just too old school.
I mean, I think there is an element of like, you have to try things to make them better, right? Like, you have to get. You have to try things so that your company is better at like, using tech. And the more you use something, the better the product should theoretically get as well. So if both sides sort of situation, if it's like a dance, you know, like a school dance, right? If both sides sit on with their backs against the wall, no one's gonna dance, no one's gonna. Nothing's gonna happen. Even if you're bad at dancing, you know, you'll get better over time. You'll figure out, right? So I, I think that, I think there's two dynamics that are crashing into each other.
Let's take the truckload brokerage space, which I think is, to me, the most interesting things I write about are truckload brokerage and freight forwarding, because those are those intermediaries where they don't own the cargo, they don't own the space. They're just coordinating, right? And so they have to be at the forefront of tech and they have to be super efficient. And they have. But they also have to be really good at serving customers, right? And so I think there's this, there's sort of like this war of every three. Pl wants to be as efficient as possible. You want like less touches per file. You want, you want your employee to be doing more shipments per year. Whatever your metric is to gauge efficiency, right?
Like you, I'm sure every CEO or broker would be like, I would love to say in five years, we have 50% fewer people, right?
Yeah.
To do more volume than we're doing now. So how do you get from there to here? From there, yeah, from here to there. Sorry. But, you know, but bumping up against that is exactly what you said. It's like, in the meantime, you can't go, well, I'm just going to, like, try all of this stuff, get really good at it, so that in two, three years, I have the best set of software and I'm really good at using it. But in the meantime, you've lost all of your customers because you had so many issues that you weren't actually a good customer service, you know, company to them. Right. So how do you juggle those two things simultaneously to me is the most interesting challenge in our industry, honestly.
Yeah. I think, you know, some of the stuff that I see out there right now is, you know, the automated sales outreach. And, you know, I'm just going, the.
Voice agents are crazy. They sound exactly like a person. It's nuts.
Yeah. And, and I look at it as is. I, I think we're going to have to go back to the Stone Age. Like, we do that. We've already done that. Like, that, we've pivoted to that. This is, that's our primary thing is we want to go out and visit people in person because all of the voice, you know, AI agents and dialers and everything, it's only a matter of time before some of these businesses start employing one to answer all the calls and just, you know, and just compartmentalize that. And you'll never get in, you know, on the phone with anybody. But I've just found, you know, based on the data inside of my organization, that email outreach was dismal from a customer acquisition strategy. Dismal, Dismal. Like you were more likely to get blocked than anything and.
But, you know, and then, so we just picked up the phone, we started dialing cold, calling everything else, site visits, trying to get in front of people. Ironically, we started onboarding new customers in the quote unquote, worst freight market of all time. Because were able to show, like, hey, we are different and here's why, we're local. Everything else. And we took advantage of a lot of that.
Yeah.
And I think, though, like, from my perspective, the more some people push towards automation and they're like, oh, we want to reduce our headcount, put bots out there, have them dial and do all of that, I think that might backfire. And that's why I truly think like we're at a crossroads. Not even as an industry, Eric, as a society.
Oh yeah.
At what point have we automated humans out of existence essentially? And then when you. I think it's so much more dangerous to have hundreds of millions if not billions of people walking around without a purpose than anything. Because that is where anarchy comes in.
Do you I. Not to get. Obviously there's lots going on in the political landscape right now. I don't want to get political at all on this. I will say that. Did you hear either party at any point over the last year talk about anything about like the impact that AI could have on like job function? That's sort of like this quiet thing that's happening and every, I've always been in the camp of like, well, every single technological revolution has not ended work humans. It's just changed it. I still suspect that's the case. I think there's probably enough interesting things for us to do. Even if like all of the kind of menial tasks that we do each day or jobs that are completely menial tasks all day get kind of taken over. But we don't know for sure. This might be different.
This time might be different. It might be that like 80% of the population just doesn't have anything monetarily, you know, worthwhile to do for large parts of their day.
Worthwhile is the key word there because you might have a job still, but are you just completely mind numbed and staring at something all day long? I think like from my perspective, when I see some of the air quote leaders in AI coming out and saying like, hey guys, like this is a lot more powerful than a lot of you even know. If they're saying that, I think that we should probably start paying attention to because they're the ones who are there to monetize it the most. And they're like, hey guys, we should put some guardrails on this.
We're not gonna have anyone to charge if.
Correct.
If you know it's interesting. Right. Like I've had chats with people like in our industry over the last few days who have been like, we haven't, you know, we're still, people are still getting their arms around like a human interacting with like a voice agent.
Yeah.
Or you know, a bot. And not realizing it. We haven't even gotten to the point and this is happening already where bots are interacting with bots. I mean that's happening, I should say. I know, but it is like at that point it's kind of like, all right, well that's, I mean, not to go like all Skynet here, but I would, I was joking with the other someone the other day. I was like, I, I think we should probably plan on programming bots to like shop on Amazon at periodic stages during the day just so that they're buying stuff so we have something to do like in a physical warehouse to like fulfill. You know what I mean? Like, they're gonna have, we're gonna have to make the bots mimic human behavior like, so that there's a, there's like an economy still.
Right.
Because they're gonna get, there's a, like a theoretical. Where they become so perfect at the things. Like we're great. Humans are great at like figuring out where something is wrong.
Yeah.
And then addressing it and getting creative. Like the creative side of us is what's, I mean, if everything is optimized to the hundredth degree, 100% perfect, there's no problems to solve, and all of a sudden like a lot of the economy, which is on fixing problems, goes away. And then what?
Yeah, dude, I'm right there with you. Right. Like, I am probably the last person who wants government in anything at all. But this is kind of one of those things, man, where I, I don't know if we've ever. And again, I could be completely wrong here. I don't know if we've ever been at a point in time where literally every single industry could effectively be changed, disrupted big time.
Yeah, yeah.
You know what I mean? So I feel like, you know, again, and I guarantee this conversation has happened time and time again, but like, I feel like we've gotten to a point now where know, you just look at automation with, you know, manufacturing, you know, inside robots, you know, loading trucks, all of that. And then there's just more and more advancements than that. And yeah, there could be more jobs created. But is this going to be developed at such a rapid pace where there's going to be a massive whiplash effect where all of a sudden there's a couple hundred million people who are sitting around like what the are we supposed to do?
Oh, you know what's so the pace is the. It to me is the most. It's not that it's happening, but like how the, like how quickly cycles are happening now. So one thing that's been very interesting to me to observe, I just posted something this on Twitter the other day, but is you have companies now who are focused around automation and AI who were like founded in the last year. Yeah, year 18 months. And they are talking about companies that were founded in 2016, 2017, as if they're dinosaurs.
Yeah.
And remember those companies that were founded in 1718, those are the ones who would post something on LinkedIn. And then all the people who came before them were like, oh, look at these guys. They don't know anything about our industry. And then, you know, those companies were calling everyone else dinosaurs. And it's already like, it's already at the point. And I guarantee you there will be a company that was founded in like 21 or 22 that will be called in black and white in print, like, oh, they have Legacy software from 22. That will be a phrase that is spoken this year, which is nuts like that. I mean, we used to talk about legacy software being from the 90s. In like three years ago, legacy software was from the 90s.
Now we're talking about, oh, it might be post pandemic is considered legacy software.
It is. It's so crazy, man. I, I just look, you know, Steve Setka commented, you know, producers will always have a job and winners are always going to win. And I agree with that statement. Right. But like, ultimately though, it's interesting to see where we're at and then it's going to be interesting. I think what's going to be the most interesting to see is the people who are ultimately paying the invoice. I'm not talking about the transportation company owners, I mean, the shippers who are doing business with you. Because that's, you know, how we all afford to operate, you guys, just in case. It's going to be interesting to see if there's. That whiplash is going to come from that, where they're just going to put their hands up and be like, you guys, enough's enough.
Like, who the am I even talking to here? What are we actually doing? And then the stone Age brokers, Allah, the me of the world who are going to walk around and, you know, tuck in my shirt and we'll wear a nice pair of jeans and just shaking hands on the docks. If that's. They're gonna be like, I want to work with that guy. Because I actually know he's a real human being. And I know that when I call, it's actually him picking up the phone and not some bot. We could.
There could definitely be a backlash. I mean, this is, I just don't know. I have no idea. Like, when people ask me for my predictions, I'M like, I don't know. I, like, I, I wish I knew, but I have no idea how it will go. I mean, I, I, I feel like there's a lot of change on the horizon, but I don't know for sure.
So I'm right there with you know, But I also look at it like, no matter what, man, society's always going to be faced with something, right? Like, there's always going to be some event or up, up and coming thing that's going to potentially alter all of our lives. And, you know, you got to be open to that. And again, but like, all when it boils down to it, you just got to show up and make it work, right? Like we work, you know, at least from my perspective, the free market is the most beautiful system that anybody can operate in because everybody's got a chance, right? Maybe we're going to be talking in 12 months, Eric, and we're going to be like, nobody saw that coming. Now look at all of those entrepreneurs who came out and developed anti AI. AI.
Yeah, yeah, totally. You know, to me, I was talking with someone this week and, well, I won't give the background on it because it seemed to be, you know, an area that we don't want to go down. But I was talking to someone this week and I was like, look, as long as you're creative and you are quick on your feet and you care, there will always be a job in the market for people. I think that's fair to say.
Right.
But not everybody is all three of those things. So you have to, like, if you are one of those things, you have to hone it. If you're not, you need to work on it, basically.
So, no, I'm right there with you, man. I'm not going to ask you what your prediction is on it, because you just answered that. I'll never, I'll never. So what is your prediction? Prediction, Eric, I can't even predict who's.
Going to win the Super Bowl. You want me to predict what's going to happen over the next 10 years?
So I'm gonna call it right now. The Chiefs are gonna win and then there's. All the headlines are going to be that the refs are. Yeah, and that's just what it's going to be. And you know, and honestly, I'd rather have that than Philly win anything like those guys. At the end of the day, even.
All your listeners in Philly. Oh, my God.
If you are an Eagles fan. At the end of the day, you. At least you guys like you. All right.
I was gonna say. I was gonna say I have lots of good friends in Philly. I was gonna say that I was not looking forward to a Bills, Eagles super bowl because I don't know if it's something about D.C. But there are so many of both of those fans in this area, and they're both the most obnoxious sets of fans. Not to say that, you know, like, other fans can't also be obnoxious, but I was not ready for that.
So America needed Buffalo, Detroit, Super Bowl. That's what America needed.
That would have been cool. But then you would have had. Then you would have had one fan base that was like ultra demoralized because it's like, oh, we finally got to the super bowl and we still. And. And then we. We lost the other team that's more like cursed than us.
It probably would have been the Bills losing too, because then there'd just be. Over in the Super Bowl. I was hoping that the. The, The. Sorry, I was gonna say the Redskins, the Commanders, they changed. I was really hoping that they were fun to watch because that was another one. And then just an ultimate you to their old owner.
Yeah, totally. I know that would have been amazing if they won.
Phenomenal to have them in there.
So.
But dude, are you. You guys have some events coming up here. You're going to be on the road. How can anybody kind of reach out to you to kind of get caught up with what you got going on Besides going to Joc.com and subscribing to that one. You guys. And get out there. It's the best money you'll spend for industry news by any means.
I appreciate that. Yeah. So TPM is coming up in less than four weeks. We start it's the March 2nd. That's our huge container shipping.
Yeah.
Global. Global supply chain kind of event that's in Long beach. In just Google TPM25, you'll find it. Best way to reach out to me is LinkedIn. Probably. I'm probably on there more than any. Any of the other channels. I'm still on Twitter, but I have a love Haverl relationship with that place and you do.
And I love seeing your love hate relationship with Twitter.
It's really been bad the last few weeks. Not because of any election stuff, but just because it seems more crazy than ever. Like the crazies are really out and. And so I. You can reach me there too. But like, LinkedIn is usually the best place to reach me outside of my email, which is Eric JohnsonP. So perfect.
Eric, I love it. Thank you so much for joining me. That's gonna be it for today. I know you guys got value in this one, so subscribe to the show, you guys, if you're feeling really ambitious when you're out there on itunes and Spotify, rank the show as well, because that's how we get it out there to the universe, you guys. Because if you saw value, that's how your network's gonna probably see value as well. I appreciate you guys. I love you guys and we'll be talking to you soon. Dude, I'll.