One of the major concerns surrounding artificial intelligence is that it could take people’s jobs. That wasn’t the goal for two carriers that decided to implement AI into their operations.
Deen Albert, vice president of operations at Grand Island Express, and Mark Scanlan, vice president of operations and safety at D.M. Bowman Inc., said during a panel discussion on Real-World AI in the Trucking Industry Tuesday at the Truckload Carriers Association annual convention in Phoenix that they didn’t want to use AI to eliminate jobs but rather to make their employees’ jobs easier.
“We communicated very early on that these tools were meant to bolster the business, make the company stronger, make it more robust, use it as a growth engine,” Scanlan said. “When people realized that their careers and their livelihoods are tied to the success of the business – because we're attempting to evolve as the industry changes – that we were actually doing it for them, not against them, our buy-in actually came in pretty quick.”
Albert said he pledged to his staff that if the AI he was onboarding “create(d) room where we don't need people in a certain area, I'm going to find something else for you to do,” and he has. He said the AI has allowed for more volume into the company’s network, generating a different kind of work for his staff, while AI does the heavy lifting of other tasks.
Grand Island Express and D.M. Bowman both use AI to optimize their dispatching networks and on the safety side with image recognition on their in-cab cameras. Albert said his company also uses it in driver communications to identify important messaging and for scrubbing emails with plans to implement it further.
Making the leap
Only about half of the audience at Tuesday’s panel raised their hands when asked if they currently use AI in their operations, but Zach Schuchart, senior vice president and head of sales at Optimal Dynamics, said everyone uses AI and has been for some time.
He said the challenge is determining how AI can best support your organization and your customers. Though he thinks no one is every truly ready to implement AI, he said, to start, carriers need to assess their organizations to discover what problems AI can solve.
It took Grand Island Express about a year to dive in.
Albert said the more his team dug into automation, the more they realized the organization wasn’t yet ready. He went on site to another carrier to watch them use AI to help him identify areas of need in his own organization before gauging his team’s support and appetite for AI.
He wanted to implement AI to drive efficiency and grow the company’s network, he said, but the company hit a wall. That wall was the lack of human bandwidth to perform the complex mathematical equations that AI can do in a snap.
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Scanlan said before carriers dip their toes into AI, they need to determine where they are now, where they want to be and then identify the roadblocks or hindrances to their organizations that are preventing them from getting there.
“For us, we were looking at building density. We had probably some utilization opportunity where we had either trucks or lanes or even drivers that weren't fully utilized,” he said. “It takes a lot of human intellectual horsepower in order to solve those problems on a recurring basis throughout the day. We were looking for a way to either automate or simplify those processes to free the staff to handle more complex issues.”
Choosing a vendor
Scanlan said D.M. Bowman wanted to apply AI to its operations, but he didn’t know what questions to ask and wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to do with it. That decision was made harder by the sheer volume of vendors, making the process overwhelming.
Ultimately, the carrier chose a partner with a robust team that would do the heavy lifting, he said.
“It's (dependent on) the talent of your team, who you choose to partner with as a service provider, the complexity of your network, or the problems that you're trying to solve,” Scanlan said. “I want to reiterate one point: your partner is so critical to the success of that build up and roll out.”
He said you want to find a vendor that will be a true partner and roll through the process alongside you and not just get into a relationship with a provider out of urgency to jump on the AI bandwagon.
“The peer pressure is real,” he said, adding that his company didn’t want to be behind the tech curve or lose competitive edge.
Albert said Grand Island customers are very in tune with what the company is doing to improve, so AI can be a selling point. But he said carriers need to resist pressure until they find the right use case for it that will enhance their company versus take away.
Albert’s team spoke with existing customers of the TMS provider Grand Island to see who they were using as AI vendors and how that integration went during its process of finding an AI partner, whereas Scanlan said he wasn’t worried about an AI product based on compatibility with D.M. Bowman’s TMS because the right vendor was able to work around that.
The legal side of AI
AI is just a tool; a human – or in this case, the carrier – is still held accountable if something goes wrong, said Jonathan Todd, vice chair of the transportation and logistics group at Benesch Law.
That’s why Grand Island only uses AI as a suggestion – still allowing a human to make the final call.
Todd said there are opportunities and challenges associated with AI, and companies can still be negligent even with high-performing programs in place. He gets calls from carriers throughout the lifecycle of implementing AI – from ideation to implementation.
His advice, he said, is to have a policy in place to cement ground rules of how it can and can’t be used within your organization. It’s also a good idea to have a committee that annually reviews that policy, he added.
“Having a policy is key because not having a policy is also a message. If you don't have a policy, maybe you're communicating to your team that this isn't important or, what's probably worse, that it's just a free-for-all: you can onboard any system that you want and use it any way that you want,” Todd said. “So I feel very strongly about having some kind of a policy. You never want to write a policy that collects dust. These have to be used.”
