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 blame moving fast hey Let them all cross if they hate then let them made them make a bigger boss 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 side of 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 Friday, everybody. I got a very special guest for you guys here today, and, you know, I'm really excited to talk about today's topic, which is, you know, it's all around AI, automation and everything, but it's not about anything other than, like, where do I start, right?
Like, I feel like there's so much information that's coming at us at any given moment out there, and a lot of it is, like, at step 50 in your business, but, like, where do you start from step one, especially if you've never adopted anything like this, and there's a lot of terminology and jargon that's thrown in front of you, and you might not even know what that means, right? So at the end of the day, we're going to start that out and build that up. And I have none other than Mr. Mike Horvath on the show today with Revanova. Mike, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today.
Hey, Chris, thanks for having me. Happy Friday, dude.
Yeah, absolutely, man. And, you know, it's. It's exciting times out there, and, you know, you. You've been in tech for a while, you've kind of seen all of this, and you're especially on the front lines of, you know, building out all of this stuff. And, you know, I know I see so much stuff that pops up throughout the. Every single day, Mike. There's like a new tool that's being released and everything. And, you know, from my perspective, it's like, where do you start? And like, how do you know that you're actually putting the right tech inside of your company for, like, where it's at? So how do you guys at Rev and Nova really attack that head on?
Yeah. AI obviously is the hottest thing going right now in our industry. People are looking around to see how they can use it, what it can do. And there's multiple facets of AI. So there's the ability to use AI to look at large amounts of data and predict things. Right. So we've seen movement in that area and on rating, you know, try to predict spot market rates by, you know, churning a bunch of historical data, throwing AI engines at it and trying to predict things. You can use AI to create documents, right? So declarative AI where it's, I need to create a letter for something and it creates a beautiful textual description for you. You can use AI to.
Probably the best use case we've seen is AI to read documents, read emails, and turn it into structured data that can then be used in your applications. And, you know, that's where we started. We're really fortunate that, you know, being on the Salesforce platform, like we're developed, you know, Salesforce is doing, you know, tremendous work in the world of AI. You know, they've had Einstein AI for quite some time. They just recently introduced Agent Force, which is a whole AI framework that lives on the platform. And of course, all of our customers can leverage that. And in addition to that, you know, we launched our Artemis AI capabilities, you know, that are baked into the tms.
And we started with what we think are the two most obvious use cases that we've seen people use, which is taking unstructured data, that's emails that are coming at you, or just typing in a conversational way into the interface and creating records and automating a flow. So the first two that we did were quoting. So, you know, as a broker, you get all kinds of email, inbound emails, how much do freight from here to there? How much do freight from here to there? Right, right.
And so how can you automate that and do it quickly and do it accurately and using AI to process those documents and then have it literally feed the TMS to do the rest of the things that the TMS is already doing, you know, quickly rate this load quickly communicate back to the customer who asked for that rate, what that rate might be, and the ability for them to book it. Right. So it's a combination of AI doing the hard part, reading the document, turning it into real data, doing that accurately, and then pitching it into the TMS as if a user entered it. Right?
Yeah.
The way we think about AI agents is they're automated people, you know, doing the things that people might be doing, but not all the things that people can do because it's not there to do everything, but it can do some of the just mundane task, very heavy, task oriented data entry stuff very well. And, and that's on the tech side of it, right? There's a lot of movement on the voice side too. We're working with a number of partners in that area on voice agents that have AI driven telephony conversations with carriers and potentially customers that can update the TMS or grab data from the TMS and voice it back to the caller. So that's quoting is a big one, load creation and quoting. And then the second one is capacity.
And everybody gets the emails daily, hey, I've got 10 trucks in Dallas trying to get out. And sometimes it's a real pain just to get that stuff into your system so you can operationalize it. And so what Artemis does is really help our customers do both of those functions in a very efficient manner. Read those emails or just copy and paste text in the UI and it creates those postings for you. Copy and paste the text into the UI or read an email automatically and quote, generate quotes for customers.
Yeah, it's, you know, the thing that I am, you know, I've talked about this frequently on the show, right. Like, I truly feel like As a broker, 95% of my day should be automated. There are a couple of key components that I will personally never choose to automate. But I look at it as, you know, like were talking before we jumped on the show here, Mike. Like I operate in the real world and it's not just like, oh, snap your fingers all of a sudden. Everything's figured out in business.
And you know, there is, there's so much coming at you so quick and you spend so much time developing a book of business, developing customers, and then that inevitable windfall of opportunity hits and you might be in a position in your business where, you know what you don't have the money to invest in hiring three to five people to join your staff. And if you do have that money, everybody knows the inherent risks that comes along with it. There's always a natural ramp up period. But if you have opportunities coming your way now, you need something to help Strike when the iron's hot to where you don't let your competition seek in and, you know, and eventually take that business away from you.
And that's what excites me the most about a lot of this is I feel like for those companies out there that are bootstrapping or who are, you know, trying to scale in a smart manner where they can start leveraging a lot of this tech out there, Mike, to where they can piece it in and, you know, maybe they can keep their headcount lower for a little bit longer. So they can, you know, because as you grow and scale, you don't know how to. You might not have processes for certain things yet. This gives you some time to build up a lot of that to help you grow in a way to where it's like, you're not going to feel like you're overwhelmed and eventually just throw your hands up in there and be like, all right, I don't want this.
Or the dreaded missed opportunities that do come into your inbox, and you don't see it because it gets buried for whatever reason.
Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, the early, I think very successful use cases have been, you know, get me out of data entry mode, get me into value add mode. AI can do all the data entry for you. It can read documents with great high degree of accuracy, put the information in front of you, can even do research on your behalf very rapidly for you and come back to you with all the information you need to then maybe take that next step. And it saved you all that time. You're working the harder, complex things. And a lot of the research and data entry is taken care of by the automation. And then that's if. And that's where we see, you know, the biggest lift right now and the most success right now. And over time, who knows where it goes? You know, it's.
You know, the technology is very evolving. There's all kinds of players in it and, you know, we'll see how it all shakes out, you know, and then Salesforce, of course, is putting huge investments into it with agent force and all the things there's. And so we're very excited about where we can take it in this, you know, in our tms, you know, to help our customers be more productive, add a lot of value to the users that they do deploy.
So with the people that you're talking to right now, whether it's customers, prospects or anything out there, what's the biggest concern with a lot of where this is? Right? Because again, I feel like, you know, for me personally, it's like there is so much coming out at rapid pace, right? There's so many different offerings that are coming out in front of people. What do you actually need? Right? And then, and then furthermore the downstream effect. What are your customers or carriers actually requesting from you as well? Because I feel like sometimes you think tech is going to fix your business for whatever reason, right? You think like, oh, I have this flashy tool, everybody's going to want to work with me.
Yeah, I agree. I think, you know, we've always been, that's why we call it CRM Power Transportation Management because it's all about customer carry relationships. Right. And you know, there's no better relationship vehicle than people talking to people. You know, it's, when you have relationships, it's usually not through technology. It's relationships are, you know, I meet you and I get along, we want to work together, we know we can trust each other. And so I think, you know, there's this balance you have to strike with automation, you know, versus the personal contact you have with your customers and carriers. Because when, you know, things are, chips are down, I think the relationships matter. We truly believe that. And our system is designed to help you manage those things. So I think that's the. Watch out.
Of course, all these, any new technologies and any new technology companies that come up, it's all about how much staying power do they have? Will they be around a year from now? Will they be around two years from now? We've had to cross that bridge. We're in our 11th year now and we've, you know, cross over that bridge. And we're not a startup, you know, we're a growth company and you know, we have a very solid customer base and you know, we're in that space. But, you know, as an early stage company, we had to cross those same barriers, right? So anytime, you know, you have these new technology companies evolving, you know, when we talk to partnerships in this area, you know, we're very cognizant of, you know, what's the staying power of that vendor look like?
You know, will they be around for me a year from now or two years from now? Do they have the funding, do they have the solution? And so those are the questions I think everybody has to ask, you know, anytime new vendors appear and many of them will, you know, and some of them won't, you know, that's just the nature of, you know, software in general. So those are some of the questions you have to ask. I think the other thing now is that we see is, and it's been a challenge in our industry since day one really is, you know, integration versus, you know, innovation. Right. And so one of the reasons why we like where we're going with it is this, you know, baked in already integrated AI capability.
There's a lot of AI environments, but then they require a lot of integration in order for them to work. Right. And so there's a whole layer of work that has to be done before it's effective and that's doable and it happens all the time. But that's the other kind of challenge that you might have is, okay, how does this AI platform that can do these cool AI things work with my data? How does it communicate with my system? How does it get and put data back in? How secure is that? What else is being used? You know, when I pass that data off to the third party, is it being used in another way, you know, being resold? Other types of things that you have to ask anytime your data is leaving your platform.
So we've always been a big proponent of doing, you know, keeping the data, you know, on the platform as much as possible, just sharing the data you want to share with third party vendors in a way that makes sense for your business and doesn't expose any kind of proprietary secrets, you know, customer carrier relationships that might compromise those things. Right. And you know, you have to be cognizant of that because, you know, as most freight brokers, right. I mean, your relationships and the things you have with customers and carriers are your really are your business. That is your business. And, you know, if those things are compromised through any kind of technology integrations, you know, just got to be mindful of that.
Yeah. I mean, you're throwing a lot out there, Mike. And that's. I love that. Right, because that's not ever discussed, right. Like, hey, what does happen to my data internally there? Right. Is that something that's being used? How secure is it? And you know, I've tried to talk about that on the show and you know, in the past with other guests, and you've given about as straight of answer as you possibly can with it, a lot of people kind of like to sidestep that topic. And you know, because like that, you know, as you're out there building up anything, you know, your customer information, all of that stuff, your rate information, operational trade secrets that you might have, I know some people might not think that you know, that they exist in freight, but they do. Right.
Like, certain people operate in a certain way and I want to keep that stuff internal. I don't want that potentially leaking out to anybody. And then, you know, ultimately, and this is another hurdle that a lot of individuals cross as a business, as a freight broker, excuse me, when you're prospecting customers, you brought up about, like, hey, are you going to be around in 12 months? You know, like, that's a very real thing because you're investing a lot into your, you know, shippers or customers. Just like they're investing a lot into you and they need to make sure that you're financially sound to be there for an extended period of time. And, you know, business is hard enough, right, like out there to get it to build up and to run. But, like, it's a very real concern.
And sometimes it, you know, there's a lot of stuff going at you. I think it was Peter Thiel who said this in his book Zero to One, where it's like, sometimes it does not matter how good your product is, how, whatever, if it's the bad time or if it doesn't adopt, it's like there's nothing you can do about it, right? And then all of that work and effort that you put out there, what happens to a lot of that stuff? And, you know, and I feel like that's a very large concern for a lot of people in a lot of different industries. Like, I don't think that's just a freight thing. I think, like, when there's so many startups that are coming out there, you know, if they're gonna, Are they gonna make it? What, what have you seen in your career, Mike?
Like, what makes a successful tech company? And what are some of these things that maybe some of these people can kind of look or ask or maybe prod around a little bit in that prospecting phase to kind of see is, are you going to be here in 12 months?
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. You know, it always starts with value delivering for the customer. Right? So what's the ROI on your solution? And then it's also married up against what's the competitive. What's the competitive scenery look like? Right. And so it's, you know, it's not. There's no, I don't think there's a black and white answer to this one. It kind of comes down to. At any early company, and were very fortunate. We had a lot of people that said, hey, I love your vision. As a company, I like where you're going. We had the benefit of having Salesforce as a infrastructure. So as a startup, were a startup building an application, but on a very proven, very solid, long standing infrastructure platform. And so even if went away, you could run our app in Salesforce, continue to run it. Right.
So, because Salesforce is going to be around. And so that was a big benefit we had. That's. Those are the questions you have to ask, right? How well are you funded? How much Runway do you have? How many customers do you have right now? Who are they? You know, what, you know, talk to them, talk to the references, you know, to me, I think that's the big key. Is, is anybody else using it or are you the first? You know, and sometimes again, you know, you're willing to take the risk. Some, some of these things are plug and play too, by the way. I mean, you know, let's say you wanted to test the concept of, you know, AI and the vendor that you really liked and you get a great pricing and everything, but they just somehow went out a year later.
But the value prop was there. There's probably another vendor you can swap in. You know, it's going to be a little painful, but, you know, you've proven the value. So sometimes it's even okay to do those things. We've seen it happen, we've done it ourselves with, you know, things that were looking at to enhance our business. And really, hey, let's take a flyer on this because I think they got some upside and let's go. And you know, sometimes you win those, sometimes you lose those. But I do think those are the things you should be asking, you know, all those types of things. Vet the vendor on their financial stability, you know, kind of on their business processes, you know, who's involved, who are the people? Back to startups.
Yeah.
And you know, go from there. Yeah, that's all. That's how we tend to look at it, is there?
I mean, I kind of feel like there's a little bit of, you know, tech hesitancy out there. Right. Because if you go back to like 2018 and then especially now, it's like, you know, I know the digital broker movement was a massive thing and then now it's like, you know, marketing is a very real concern for a lot of people out there. And you know, it's like, I feel like eventually we're going to hit that point of like, oh, it's another AI tool. Right. And, you know, and it goes back down to, I think for me it's like, I don't know if AI is going to be considered a fad. Like a lot of people might be thinking like, oh, this is just kind of the next iteration.
I feel like this is something that is going to be definitely a very big thing for a very long time. And I feel like it is a very good opportunity, I think, for, you know, businesses of all sizes. But I really look at it as like the small to mid sized businesses that are out there, that this really can strengthen your punch out there from an operational standpoint, right? Where now you're going to be in a position to where it's like, again, I want to hire real people, but at the end of the day I have a budget that I have to operate off of. And if you can't afford multiple people, but you can afford some solid technology, especially one that's already built into your tms and you can deploy that out there, how much can that elevate you, right?
Because I look at it as, you know, like obviously the biggest threat to the majority of small businesses out there is cash, right? Like you are at essentially running a 30 day sprint every 30 days while you're trying to build up your coffers to keep your business financially solvent for a specific Runway. And I look at it as is my most important thing is my time and my time to focus on revenue generating activities, not chasing down certain things that are out there where this is where you can implement tech inside of your business. So you can go out there and focus on cold calling customers, speaking to your existing customers, all of that stuff out there and strengthening those.
Because just like with anything, there is a million of your competitors that are out there hitting up all of your customers at any given moment, waiting for you to slip.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, 100% agree. And you know, and we've always taken that mantra, which is, you know, we think with our solution you can focus more on the innovation side of your business and not the integration side of your business, which is, you know, an IT heavy type of thing to get 12 products to work together to make it happen. I do think AI has legs, you know, I think, you know, we've all seen it, right? We had the blockchain wave, then we had all the capacity stuff and then we had the rating stuff. And you know, kind of each year, each season at tia, you'd say, okay, what's the bell of the ball? And it's, you know, what's being talked about this week, you know.
Yeah, and, but I think, you know, there's been some really good use cases using AI around for a long time. You know, hubtran now Triumph audit. Using AI to process documents, turn it into data and help on the settlement process. And I think that's how AI is going to have a big impact on our industry is this ability to take unstructured data and turn it into structured data in ways that in a much easier way using AI engines to do that, to do predictive things. Taking a look at your data as you collect it over time and start to predict things for you mostly probably around rates. Carrier performance would be another really good example of digesting a lot of data points and coming back with outcomes and training it, training the engine to do the right thing.
Think of it like your best people. You're training the engine to think like your best people and work like your best people would do it and interpret things like your, you know, experienced people would interpret it. And that's how you can do. You know, a big part of this is training, right? You know, part of our Artemis solution is a whole training concept that allows when things don't get done. You know, AI engines hallucinate, they come back and they say, well, you know what I just read looks like this and you're like, doesn't look anything like that. Yeah, but you can train it, you can fix it and you can see the statistics as you train the engine and how well it gets as it bring as you start helping it learn how your industry works.
And in our world, you know, every one of our LLMs that we use for our customers is all private. Right. Going back to the security thing, your data is private to you. We can't even see it. I can't even log into your system without you granting us permission. You know, it's not a asp. We're a multi tenant solution where your data is your data. You license our application to use its processing, but your data is your data. Same with LLM. You know, it's your LLM. You know, you're training it for your business. It's not shared with other people, it's not mixed with other transactions. We think that's the right way to go. It's highly tuned for your business and it'll learn over time as you train it. And I think it's got legs, I really do.
I think those use cases aren't going away until people abandon email and abandon unstructured data, which is going to be. It's like the paperless office, right? It's never going to happen. So it can be used to read those things and turn it into data and respond automatically if it's confident enough, like your best people would. Or you can use it just to create things where people have that final stage gate to let things go. But you've optimized that process. You can digest thousands of things at one time and turn it into data and automatically respond to maybe 90% of it and 10% based on your business rules. You say, nope, those types of things I want people touch. These types of things I'll automatically respond to.
And there's also this concept of reasoning or conversations that you can have with AI so it doesn't have to be, oh, I got it all right the first time. It could be, hey, I got most of it right. The AI might ask a few more questions to the person on the other end of that conversation to get all the information needed. Now I'm going to hand it off to you, Chris, so you can go and close the deal, right? But the AI has done some of the heavy lift data gathering on the front end. Didn't you know, you didn't have to spend any minutes doing that. The AI minutes are way less costly to you as a business and a, you know, human minutes. And so you can optimize your people and they can have your people doing value add.
You know, if it's necessarily replacing people so much as optimizing the person's time, you know, doing all the mundane heavy lift textual research and data entry that you don't, you know, yet you normally would have to do in a system in order to get to where you want to be to make the next decision. Do that really quickly with AI, I.
Think this is one, this is a pain point for a lot of sales managers out there is, I think I've heard from everybody that nobody updates the CRM with any information. So this is a good way for you to hold your people accountable, to update in your CRM and make sure all the customer notes are up to date and everything. Because, you know, like, for me personally, like one of my biggest weaknesses, Mike, is I don't write anything down, right? Like, I got it all going on up in my head. I can tell you exactly what's going on. I don't want to waste my time with that stuff, right. Fortunately, I have a business partner who loves to write shit down. So we're good from that perspective.
But, you know, I'm One those where it's like I like to act first, think second in most instances, whether that's good thing or a bad thing. But this is where I, you know, we personally utilize a, a tool for the media stuff that we do. It's called Fireflies AI where we drop in all the show files in there, it spits out a transcript for us, it gets everything and then it'll take out top talking points for us to utilize for our newsletter and then for the show notes and a lot of that stuff out there. And it does it in a matter of seconds. Right, so again, talking about time now.
My, my team behind the scenes here, they can do that and then focus on other activities out there about, hey, editing out the clips and everything else while we're doing the transcription to where it's like my little show packs a massive punch with a lot of high production teams that are out there. And we just utilize the right tool to amplify our outreach out there. And then you can plug and play all of that terminology inside of transportation where it's like if you're ever walking into a, a big sales meeting, drop in. And I've used this on chat GPT for example, where I'll drop a company's name in there and say, what are some key current events going on with this company? And then it spits out 37 different things for you to go over, skim over those notes.
And I feel like that preparedness aspect of it as well. It saves you time. It does, you know, and it lays it all out for you in a step by step guide. Why wouldn't you want to use something like that?
Yeah, and you can see where this can go, I mean, over time, you know, as everything improves. I mean, you have, you've already seen the deep fake videos that look like the person, it sounds like the person, it talks like the person. And you can see how you could have a conversational, I could be an AI robot, you know, imagined Paige right now talking to you, interacting with you. And when the technology gets to the point where it can be this conversational and it's getting closer and closer, you've probably heard some of the voice agents like, you know, Fuma or fleetworks or some of the other guys are doing the voice stuff, you know, it's getting pretty close to like human type interaction and it's still got some, you know, wrinkles in it, but it's pretty good.
There's some, there's some use cases where that will work and you know, we'll see. I mean, you know, it's a lot of people testing it right now and looking at it and I think there's a lot of upside there. If it continues to evolve, it could be as good as this kind of conversation potentially. And when it gets there, it's kind of scary at the same time isn't really is but you can see the power of it, you know, if you use it correctly and it could kind of have this kind of conversational interface.
That's because I think people do like talking to people and when you can have someone who sounds and looks and feels and is as smart as a person and maybe even smarter in some ways having access to loads of information that they can learn very quickly, the power there is enormous if it's done correctly.
Yeah, no, I'm right there with you. Right. Like I feel like it the deep fake aspect of things and this is where I'm like it kind of really because like I like going out, meeting people in person, Mike. Like I like actually shaking people's hands and stuff like that. I feel like that's how sales is going to go back to the stone age. Right. Because like all the AI dialers that are out there for sales reps right now, for example, you think it like the manufacturers and the, you know, they aren't just going to employ an AI bot to field every incoming sales call that comes your way. So what are you going to do? How are you going to stand out to crowd?
And for me, I'm going to polish up my boots and go out and knock on doors and shake hands that way. Because I feel like inevitably when it swings into one direction and then again one thing that I've just personally found success in business when everybody's saying run to the right, I turn to the left and I sprint because that's generally where all the results are. Because nobody's doing it that way.
Yeah, I think they're always, I hope there's always room for human interaction and I think AI doesn't necessarily. I think it can replace certain aspects of a conversation or certain data gathering things. As I mentioned earlier, I would hope that it doesn't replace human to human interactions. I'm the same way views. I like to get out and meet people, talk to people in person. And there's something you can't replace that with tech, even zoom meetings. Right. They're just not as personal as out there in person talking to somebody, having a lunch or something, meeting at a trade event, talking to them one one. You lose something when you have this screen in between people. It's not bad. I mean, certainly better than just no screen kind of talk at all.
But I think over time, you know, the AI will be a component of an interaction, a component of a process. It might do some full processes, but, you know, right now, what we see the best use cases are it's. It's assisting people get their job done faster. You know, their assistants, they're not replacements.
Yeah, I love that. And, Mike, you just literally armed everybody with a mess of questions that they can take out to the TIA and go and ask everybody, because, you know, undoubtedly AI will be the literal number one topic for. For most people. Go out there, stop at the Revanova booth next week and everything out there at the tia. Mike, are you going to be there next week?
You know, I'm not going to be there next week, unfortunately. You know, we've. This year, we've got a whole crew out there. Yeah, you know, very excited about it. Yeah, definitely come see us. You'll get a lot to talk about and, you know, love to hear about what you might need as a customer and see if we got a good fit.
I love it, Mike. Thank you so much. And you guys definitely need to check out Revenova. It is who I personally use inside of my brokerage. I spend more time in that platform than any other piece of technology that I utilize you guys to run my brokerage out there. So hit them up. Hit them up at the trade show. Mike, thank you so much for joining me. That is going to be it for today, ladies and gentlemen. The Freight Coach Road show is going to be on full effect next week. You guys, I'm out on the road every day next week. You'll see me in person and out there, obviously in the signature orange. But as always, if you got value in what you heard, subscribe to the show.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you're feeling really ambitious after this one, which you should be, rank the show on itunes and Spotify, because that's how your network's going to see value. And if you saw value, chances are they will as well. I appreciate you guys. I love you guys, and we'll be talking to you soon. Absolutely.