How Logistics Veterans Should Be Thinking About AI with David Bell

Episode Transcript
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David Bell (00:00):
If we can take our AI and have them scrub load

(00:08):
boards and make calls and have adriver, have a have a driver,
call in, driver manager thatthey can call in find out
they're getting paid. Find outif their wire got done. Find
out, you know, maybe money ontheir fuel car, everything
drivers call, you know, drive.
You know, I had a truckingcompany. I logistic trucking.
We'd have drivers on hold, andthey were last ones to get
picked up on the call. It'slike, whether they're just
driving, well, they need help.

(00:28):
They don't want to sit on holdfor 1215, minutes waiting for
the dispatcher or driver managerto pick up and find out if their
wire is going out today so thewife can pay their bills. I
mean, this, it's, it's superbusy. So like, if you can just
give driver you just have adriver management AI and driver
interactive AI that to work withdrivers like it's I think that
just That step alone is big,because they just want

(00:48):
information and they're andthey're left on hold.

Blythe Brumleve (00:53):
Welcome into another episode of everything is
logistics, a podcast for thethinkers in freight. I am your
host, Blythe Milligan, and weare proudly presented by SPI
Logistics, and we've got anotherincredible episode for y'all
today, and we've got DavidValley is the co founder and CEO
of CloneOps, and we're gonna betalking about how logistics
veterans can start implementing,or start thinking about

(01:16):
implementing a i into theircompanies. And so David, I just
wanted to say I just got donelistening to the entire
conversation between you andAndrew Silver on the freight
pod. And it was such a greatconversation, hearing all of
those stories, especially fromyour earlier days. I think, for
folks who, who may not know youknow you used to sell like the

(01:36):
the big gray cell phones insideof cars you used to, you know
many or help install car stereosyou started up or worked with
LTL logistics company before yousold that, you started lean
solutions. I mean, you've doneso many incredible things in and
around sales, in and around,just business and
entrepreneurialship. And I'mcurious as to why you wanted to

(01:56):
now get back into the game andstart up CloneOps.

Unknown (02:00):
Well, I mean, you know, like you said, again, everything
is logistics. I think everythingcomes back to that, like, and
it's my wheelhouse. It's whereI, you know, I've spent my last
30 years and my network and at,you know, I had an opportunity
where this AI craze seemed likeit was going to take off. And I
missed the.com because I wasburied in logistics. I missed

(02:20):
the Bitcoin because I was buriedin logistics and lean, and so
now I'm wasn't buried inanything anymore. I'm kind of
just a useless advisor at Lane,you know, doing nothing while
everybody else does the work. SoI said, you know, let me make my
let's let me go do somethingagain. I was little bit, you
know, bored, and I said, this issuper interesting to me, and I
think it's going torevolutionize logistics. And

(02:41):
just like near shoring did, andI did it with near shoring, I
thought it would be cool tomaybe try to do it again and see
if I could do it with AI. And Ithink that, I think AI is going
to revel revolutionize logisticsin a lot of other industries,
especially high phone call, highvolume, high email volume, high
phone call volume, tasks andbusinesses. AI is a game

(03:02):
changer. Now, I think it's

one thing to be interested in AI, and you know,
think of ways that you couldstart using it yourself and
implementing it yourself, butI'm curious as to what that
first aha moment was for you tosay this could actually be a
real business. I

Unknown (03:19):
mean, when I heard the voice. I heard a voice selling
some online stuff and takingcredit cards. And I basically,
you know, I listened to it, andI was like, Wow, this sounds
pretty much as good as, youknow, anybody it's actually
sounds better when you get whenyou talk to people, like, with
thick accents and call centers,like, it's very frustrating and

(03:39):
having to repeat. You know, Ihave a simple personal email and
my initials, basically, andevery time I give it to somebody
over the phone, I gotta repeatit, like five times, and it's
like, I'm, like, an AI just getsit immediately, like, you say it
once it got it, has it. So Ijust thought that it's, it's
going to really put a dent insome of the like the Indian the
Philippines call centers, wherewhere the accents are there, and

(04:02):
it's more articulate. And thenwhen you change to it, when you
change it like, for like,different languages and and you,
you know, we can convert to 16different languages in the
middle of a in the middle of aconversation. So I think that's
really good for logistics too,because it's such a diverse
group of of drivers and truckingcompanies and so many different
languages when you're tracking atruck, if you can go from

(04:23):
speaking English to speakingcreole or polish or or Serbian
or Russian or Mandarin Korean,like you could switch to those
languages, I think you'll get amuch better response from
dispatchers and from and fromdrivers just it's you know, that
they can communicate because I Ispeak a Little bit of Spanish,
but somebody speaks to me inSpanish, it's a little bit

(04:43):
intimidated. You don't know whatthey're saying. You don't want
to act like you don't know whatthey're saying. And I just think
it's, it's, there's so many coolfeatures to it. I think it's
going to get better and betterand better and and it's going to
be perfected. It's, it's one ofthose things that's not going to
be a flash in the pan where it'sbig and then nobody talks about
it like RPA. Or something likethat. I think this is something
that's here. It's not goinganywhere. It's going to get

(05:04):
better and better, andeventually, you know, eventually
you're going to have an AI thatjust comes in, like, I don't
know if you get in your car, Iget in my car, and my iPhone
tells me where I'm going. I'mlike, How does it know where I'm
going? It's because it has apattern. I think what's going to
happen is what we're building isan AI that every day you're
coming, you're going to get onyour computer and on our
dashboard, and you're going towork and do it. And eventually
it's going to do that work foryou. It's going to come in, it's

(05:25):
going to track your trucks, it'sgoing to read your emails. It's
basically, you're going to turnyour AI on and wake it up, and
it's going to do all this workfor you. Why you watch it work,
and then you're going to jump inand handle the stuff that needs
to be handled. And I thinkthat's where it's going to
evolve to. And so it's, it's,that's why I got excited about
it. It just, it's pretty cool.

What stood out the most to me from from what
you were just saying, becausewhen I worked at a at a
brokerage, we had one girl thatcould speak Russian, and anytime
we had a driver call in, and,you know, Ukrainian or Russian,
you know, any of those differentdialects, we had to stop
everything we were doing, Go gether, have her come and be that
translator. And she was reallylike the go to and then we had

(06:03):
to do that for, you know,Spanish speaking drivers as
well. And and that, to me, justopens up, having the ability to
be able to understand a driverthat's calling in get them to
the answer as quick as possible,I think, is one of the bigger
selling advantages. And when weconnected at at manifest, you
mentioned that that one of yourthe bots that you are creating
with clone ops, or one of thevoice agents that you're

(06:24):
creating, it will be able tohelp truckers as well, which I
think is kind of lost in a lotof these discussions about
brokers being able to use thesedifferent models. But on the
trucker side of things, Ithought that that was really
interesting, and it resonatedwith my audience, with truckers
having access to this technologytoo. Can you speak a little bit

(06:44):
more on, maybe the the truckerside of things?

Unknown (06:47):
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think when you look at, like
trucking companies, especiallythe small, the mid size, you
know, somebody with five to 50trucks, you know, they're one
man bands, one woman bands.
They're, they're doingeverything themselves. They got,
you know, a couple dispatchers,you know, I mean, one person can
run 30 trucks. So you don'tneed, you know, you don't need
five people in office to run 30trucks. So I think that when you
target those, if we can, if wecan take our AI and have them

(07:09):
scrub load boards and make callsand have a driver, have a have a
driver call in, driver managerthat they can call in, find out
if they're getting paid. Findout if their wire got done. Find
out, you know, they need moneyon their fuel car, everything.
Drivers call, you know, drive.
You know, I had a truckingcompany. I logistics trucking,
and we have drivers on hold, andthey were last ones to get
picked up on the call. It'slike, whether they're just

(07:31):
driving, well, they need help.
They don't want to sit on holdfor 1215, minutes waiting for
the dispatcher or driver managerto pick up and find out if their
wires going out today so theirwife can pay their bills. I
mean, this, it's, it's criticalto them, because they want to
make sure the money's coming inand getting paid. But somebody's
leaving them on hold becauseit's Friday and it's so busy
they can't take the call. And ifanybody knows freight on
Thursdays and Friday Fridays,60% of the freight probably

(07:51):
moves on Fridays. So like, it'ssuper busy. So like, if you can
just give driver you can justhave a driver management AI and
and driver interactive AI thatcould work with drivers like,
it's, I think that just Thatstep alone is big, because they
just want information, andthey're and they're left on
hold. And, you know, I think wetalked about it manifest, like
drivers during COVID were as asmost important as doctors. And,
you know, now they're nobodyagain. And it's just crazy how

(08:14):
we don't have, like, you know,like, sense of how important
truck drivers are, yeah,

I think that they're definitely lost in a lot
of the technology conversations,where they're almost like a
victim of, you know, increasingprivacy regulations and things
like that. And now this feelslike a tool that they could use
and use to their advantage. Now,now back over to, you know, just
sort of building out clone ops.
I'm curious with your previouscompanies that you've built out,
especially when it comes to leansolutions, you're building up to

(08:43):
1000s of employees. Do you thinkthat that is the same approach
you're taking with clone ops, ordo you see it as more empowering
one person to do maybe five to10 different roles or jobs?

Unknown (08:58):
So I mean, when I was building and thinking about
this, the last thing I wanted tothink about is AI replacing the
10,000 people we have at lean.
I'm still a shareholder, youknow, companies, amazing
company. It's, it's, you know,does great things for the for
the people of Latin America, theemployees. So last thing I want
to do is do anything that, youknow, eliminate those jobs or

(09:18):
hurt those people, and overtime, AI is probably going to
put a den in people all over theworld, here, everywhere. It's
just going to do it. But what Iwant set out to build is a one
to three year plan to make themway more productive. One of the
biggest challenges we had atlean when I was starting Lean is
comparing okay, if I'm payingsomebody 50,000 here and I'm
paying 30,000 the lien I need. Ineed, like, more than 20,000 of

(09:42):
value, because otherwise itdoesn't make sense. If I only
get 5000 of value, it's notworth the aggravation of having
somebody in Latin America. So wehave to have like, a two to one
or three to one valuation. So ifsomebody's making 50 and they're
making 30, they have to do the100% to 100% workflow. They
can't do 50% of the. Work andpay them, you know, 60% of the
salary. So that math was verytricky to understand. Hey,

(10:04):
here's what you're going to get.
So what my goal is is to take myAI, my dashboard, and clone ops
and make every employee,including liens employees or any
other call center, and makethose employees two or three
times more productive becausethey're already at a
disadvantage anyway to beproductive because they're in

(10:24):
Latin America, Spanish is theirfirst language, English is their
second so like, if we can makethem more productive than the
Lean clients and any otherclients that have any other near
shore call centers, are going tomake those people better. But
what I'm finding out is peopleare happy with what Lean's
doing. They're not trying tolook for savings and AI
implementation there. We've hadso many conversations people

(10:45):
like, when we start here, mybiggest cost center is here in
the US. Let's start here and seewhat we could do. Lean's
working. I don't want to messwith that. And I'm like, Okay,
let's start here, but eventuallyyou're going to see that our
dashboard is going to be verybeneficial for your people at
lean too, because they're mostlydoing the lower back office
functions and tracking, tracingand whatnot. So, but it's, it's
definitely interesting. But mygoal would be to to help if

(11:07):
you're, if you have people atany any near shore, including
lean, and you're trying to scaleand hire 10 people, it takes
time you have attrition, becausenow more than ever, like the
attrition is is at as high andwhen I first started lean, we
had almost zero attrition. Andnow people never quit. But now
Latin America is very, veryrobust employment and jobs are
it's very competitive there nowto get people so you have

(11:28):
attrition that has to replace ifI can solve attrition and solve
scaling first and then make themmore productive, like
elimination of jobs will comedown the road. And even if you
just eliminate your bottom 10%that you would anyway, because
they're not, you know, they'renot working well, the you know,
I mean, there's, there's plentythere to happen before you just
wipe all the jobs out.

And so, as you are, you mentioned before we
started recording that you're,you're on demo calls every
single day, and, you know,multiple like back to backs. I'm
curious as to what is one of thebigger misconceptions about
implementing AI into a logisticscompany.

Unknown (12:05):
I think that's going to be super like, that's going to
be too it's going to be easy.
It's never easy. It seems like,oh, just hook up the phone and
they call in and it's good. Butanything with tech and
integrations and API connectionslike, it's sophisticated, and it
takes time and and I think thatyou have to understand that
you're making a change in howyou do things, and it's like
turning a big ship. It doesn'tjust turn on a dime and you're

(12:28):
headed in the right direction.
It's a it's a strategy AI. AI isa strategy they should be
deploying with a timeline. Wehave a short term, a midterm and
long term strategy with AI.
Let's how are we going to deployit and make it effective and
make it work? And what we'redoing is we're finding the the
easiest, low hanging fruit withthe less lowest risk points, you

(12:52):
know, like taking AP calls, youknow, and responding to AP
emails. Most, most brokers gettons of factor companies calling
in trying to verify information,and tons of calls, where's my
check? So if we can our AI cananswer those emails, and then
the people that actually call inCould, could be answered,
instead of a person having toanswer, say, your checks going

(13:14):
on Friday, AI does. And then,with responding to emails that
actually need, a call like, Hey,I've been emailing you. You're
not giving me thing we haveviewed on, on what we posted,
getting on the home with them,and going through, Hey, okay,
here's the remittance we said,here's what we show, here's what
it is. And be able to work out,you know, why they're why they
still have something on their ARand we don't have it on our AP.
Is like doing those things, liketakes a burden off the AP, where

(13:36):
they could focus on getting APhandled and and, you know, and
only doing like, escalationswhere there's issues or an AP.
Now could focus on turningpeople onto quick pay. Instead
of answering calls, sendingemails, they can spend more time
calling out and saying, Hey,let's get you on our quick pay
program, because it's a moneymaker

for a brokerage. So outside of, you
know, maybe AP and AR. What aresome other use cases that that
you're, you're building rightnow for logistics companies,
yeah,

Unknown (14:03):
I mean, those AP and AR are kind of secondary use case.
Our primary use cases right noware our carrier sales are
tracking and tracing, and we'rebuilding some sales AI, sales,
sales agents as well. To focuson sales, because I think
anything that can increaseproductivity and sales is, is
going to be well received. And,you know, we're also working in

(14:24):
other industries too. We're notjust in logistics, where
branched often several otherindustries. We have, I think,
three, three or four pilotsgoing in completely separate
industries. So we're looking, Imean, AI is applicable over
every industry that you have,high call volumes and and, you
know, high email volumes.

I think you mentioned in that conversation
on the freight pod that thetraditional sales model is is or
the sales script is is dead. AndI'm curious as to, because we
talk a lot of like marketing andsales on this show, and I'm
curious how, as to how you thinkthat sales and marketing will
evolve in logistics. Using AI, I

Unknown (15:01):
mean, it's, I mean, there's so, I mean, I remember,
I've been out of logistics nowprobably seven, eight years, and
I used to go visit a customer,and while I was in their office,
they get five calls. Like,literally, one another call,
another call, another call. Andso, like, sometimes I joke, let
me take the call, and I, youknow, it'd be somebody from a
big broker. And I just break,you know, bust their chops on
why you're never getting thebusiness. You know, you're going

(15:23):
to get it, we're in Florida.
You're going to give me a truckon Mother's Day weekend when I
need it. You know, the produceto go to New York City. No,
okay, then I don't need youcan't do nothing for me. And
they can't, because there's nobarely, there's only a few
people on the planet that giveyou a truck on a Friday, last
minute, going to New York City,delivering on a Sunday, on
Mother's Day weekend. It's justlike, that's, that's like, the
almost the most impossible thingto deliver. And so when people
are in Florida, you know, thatwas a big thing. We use being in

(15:46):
Florida is like, you know, wetake care of year round, and we
did. But so I think sales ingeneral, like, when you have
such a saturated market, youknow, I talked about it with
Lean, like we had a five yearrunway with Lean, with no
competition, like zero, likefrom 14 to 19 before, you know,
guys like rapido popped up,which was their their
competitors. And they're goodcompetitors. They're good guys.

(16:08):
They have a good product.
They're in Mexico and liens inColombia and and so, you know,
when there's 10 competitors now,and it's harder to sell. So the
more competitors you have, theharder it is to sell. You have
to change how you're selling andbe different. And I think with
AI, I think that some of the AIthat you can use as an intro,

(16:29):
because the bottom line is, ifyou have AI, you can do
something more cost effective.
You can get better pricing andbe more efficient and and, and
give more updates. And, youknow, and just like when
tracking came out with macro,point and and the other tracking
devices. Customers want to knowwhere their freight is at all
times. So I just think sales isusing AI, and sales people are
intrigued by AI. And what we'reworking on is basically, you

(16:50):
know, creating animations ofourselves as sales people to to
basically somebody you can sendout, Hey, if you want to see
what we're about, click on myavatar and watch and have a
conversation with me, like, andsee how good our AI is. And then
it'd be like me talking rightnow. And, hey, this is pretty
interesting. I can use this.
And, you know, getting theminterested in actual AI, not the

(17:11):
product you're selling, youknow, I'm saying, if you can get
them interested in something,and then back door in what you
what you really want to sellthem, then now you're getting
their attention. Because peopledon't take calls anymore, right?
You go write the voicemail. Sendme. I mean, I get calls every
now and then I'll answer it.
It's a salesman. I believe inkarma, so I don't want to be
rude and just hang up on go.
Alright, listen, I don't want tobe rude. Let me give you my
email and just send me an emailand tell me what you're about,

(17:34):
and if I'm interested, I'll getback to you. And those emails
ultimately go right to spam orcall back. And so it's like, you
know, there's so many ways toget somebody off the phone right
now. I remember, shoot. Iremember when I was selling
bacteria for septic tanks when Iwas, like, 16 years old, and the
key was, just don't let themhang up. You know. Now people
hang out. You know, they had theold phone, they had to get up
and go like this. Now they justgo. So it's much easier to hang

(17:55):
up now. But, you know, at theend of the day, I think you have
to innovate sales and becreative, right? I mean,
marketing is one of the keycomponents, is creativity and
like, and I think our marketingteam does an amazing job.
Either, you know, they, they'vebuilt our website, I've gotten
so many compliments on it, or,you know, just our marketing and
so, like, I think that's a bigpart of it. And if you just

(18:17):
innovate and be different,right? Like, you don't, can't be
the same old thing. Like,especially in brokerages,
there's, I mean, 1000s ofbrokers now all doing some
similar they're picking up rate,moving it on with the third
party. So, like, how are youdifferent? Like, why should I
use you? And you gotta, youknow, they use you because
they're interested in you, theylike you, and they want to give
you a chance. So if you can, ifyou can reach em on a

(18:40):
conversational level, then, youknow, you have a better chance
to do business with them. And Ithink that's what sales is
about. People do business with,people they like and they want
to do business with.

I kind of want to double click on the whole
avatar, you know, being able toclone yourself, you know, at
namesake of the company withclone ops, I have always wanted
to have just a replica of myselfthat, you know, my customers and
leads can talk to, maybe not mycustomers, but my leads can talk
to that can screen them ahead oftime. And I don't think that
people are aware of how closethis technology is. Where I, you

(19:13):
know, a year ago, I was able toSynthesia, I think is, is one of
the companies out there that youcan record, you know, 30 seconds
of a video, just like this, howwe're talking, and then you can
create new scripts for thatvirtual avatar of yourself, you
know, it's, it's, it's stillthat particular tool is a
little, you know, there was alittle tweaking that they still
needed to do. I don't thinkpeople realize how close this

(19:35):
really is, to be able to talk toavatars like what you're
mentioning.

Unknown (19:40):
Yeah. I mean, it is.
And, you know, we have, we haveour little interactive robot
called Bad ask and it's book ademo, ask a question. It's cool
little robot. And we'relaunching him soon. I think
we're about ready to launch him,and it's going to be similar to
what you're going to do withhim. You're going to be able to
go to our website or on yourdashboard. You're going to be
able to just open them and talkto them and ask them a question
and say, Hey, how do I do that?
What's this? How do I do that?
As long as we fed him theinformation, the answer, he'll

(20:02):
be able to answer in aconversational manner, versus
having prompts. Just okay, well,here's the only answer you have
for this, and you got to gothrough. It's basically
interchangeable conversationalAI that you you know, isn't just
purely scripted. It's you know,it's at it's it's you know, it
adds to it and adds character toit. So I think that that that's
the start of launching that. Andthe next phase will be launching

(20:25):
our sales reps having, you know,basically a similar avatar
themselves and on their emailwherever. So when they're on
their LinkedIn, hey, if you wantto hear what I do, click my AI
and have a conversation with me.
And people are just going toclick it. Just say, what? That's
weird. Let me click it and andthen, now you got their
attention. Now you got the lead.
Now you say, now you now youdon't call and sell anything.
You call and say, Hey, what'dyou think about my AI, what do

(20:45):
you think about that? How'd youlike it? Any criticism,
anything? You like it? And yousee at the point that at your
your business anyway. And nowyou, now you get into them
asking you what you do, versustrying to tell them. Because
when you try to tell somebodywhat you're doing in sales,
they're not interested. Youknow, when you when you're
selling something, I understoodwhen they want to buy. Something
want to buy something, theylisten.

So what does, I guess the you mentioned earlier
about, you know, your your yourdemoing with different
companies, and you're very closeto launching. So I'm curious,
you know, with the companiesthat you're working with right
now during sort of the testingphase, what does an onboarding
plan look like? What ifcompanies are thinking about
using this these tools and thistechnology, what should they be

(21:25):
getting ready right now to beprepared to have that
conversation in a few months, ormaybe even a year from now?

Unknown (21:32):
It's pretty easy. I mean, we have a share file where
you upload a bunch of phonecalls if you have recordings or
documents, and it could beunstructured data, structured
data doesn't matter. You uploadwhatever data you have, we run
it through an AI model thatmodels the prompts, and we come
up with the perfect scripts andprompts. We load them into the
dashboard, and, and, and you'regood to go. You start testing

(21:53):
it. You pick a few use you pickyour use cases. Then you pick
some you pick some, um, datathat's managed. So this is
exactly I know the data I'mputting in there. I know what it
is. You test it, you load it upin a CSV. You know, an example.
We have a, you know, we'retesting a track and trace. So we
load, we export, before weintegrate, we export a CSV with
20 trucks that need to betracked, the AI agent, like an

(22:16):
example, we have an API to macropoint. Macro point gives an
exception. It says, Hey, wehaven't just stopped pinging our
AI will then trigger a call tothat driver and troubleshoot,
turning macro point back on, orturning, you know, the their
tracking mechanism back on. Andwe also have a, what we call why
you link. W i A where you at whyyou link, that if macro point

(22:36):
turns off or your traditionaltracking doesn't work, or that,
it'll send you the why you link.
And then when you don't click onit, it calls and says, Hey, we
just sent you a link becauseyour macro points off or your
traditional tracking deviceisn't working. We really need to
know where you are. Please go,click it. I'll hold and they'll
find it. They'll click it andgo, Okay, I see your locations
fort, Lauderdale, Florida. Yep.
Are you on time? Are you doingyour your schedule to get there?

(22:57):
Yep, no problem. Okay. And thenthey'll log all that information
back into the CSV, so you haveit, and then we integrate. Then
we as we're doing that testing,getting it going, as we're
working on getting theintegrations, depending how easy
you can integrate with the API,some TMSs are a little bit
harder to integrate with thanothers, and because we're just
starting right so we don't have,we don't have every TMS
integrated across the board,easy and tune so we're we're

(23:20):
building our integration plansas we go with TMS is so and then
then it integrates, and thenit's working. And then the best
part about our dashboard is it'snot just working off somewhere
that you don't know what it'sdoing. You can see all of the
work being done in ourdashboard, voice to text. So you
have transcripts, you have logs.
You can take the live takeoverif you see call, you have an
active call screen where all theactive calls are stacked like an

(23:41):
Excel sheet. And then you couldclick a button and you could
extract where you haveindividual calls. You could pull
them over and drop them in a inan area where you could see the
calls themselves happeningindividually. And then we have
the LTO takeover button, livetakeover, where if you want to
get a call, you click it andjump right in and takes a call
right over so you have to waitfor it to be transferred, or a
Slack message, or anything likethat. And, and, you know, being

(24:02):
able to do that and see what theAI is actually doing to manage
it, I think, is important,because you don't want your AI
off and who's in ag, withsomebody and they're stuck in
this AI, you know, jail thatthey can't get out of. And, you
know, it's, I mean, that's whatwe don't want. So, you know, I
think that's some of the thingswe worked into our dashboard
that you know that people want.

(24:24):
They want it. They want to knowtheir AI is not just doing
something. Have no idea whatthey're doing. They don't want
to see it after the call ends.
And then we also have scoring,where we have sentiment scores
and tonality scores. So in thein the dashboard, where the
calls are laid out like an Excelspreadsheet, like you have all
these calls that are active andongoing, and you can see the
ones that have poor tonality,poor sentiment, that maybe the

(24:47):
the voices are are louder thannormal, so it judges that it
brings them to the top of thequeue that are on potentially
unsuccessful calls, and thoseare the ones you could focus on.
And click on and open up, andthen go into and then by and
then, inherently, the thereverse of that is, if you're
doing sales, you want to see thecalls that are successful. You

(25:08):
can reverse it, filter it nowyou see the ones that are
successful. And you can jump in,because if you have somebody
that's interested, and they'reon the line and they're talking
to your AI, and they're like,curious, you can jump in and
say, Hey, what do you thinkabout the AI? Why don't we give
you? Won't we get you on boardand get you a real demo, get you
a, you know, get you an accountset up. So, like, if you're, if
you're doing sales, so, youknow, it the filters will allow
you to do that. So that's someof the cool stuff that we built

(25:30):
in, you know, and taking intoaccount, like, how do we do more
than just this voice and andback office AI, like, how do we,
what are we delivering tocustomers after we do this,
because that's who's going towin the day. How

do you envision the, I guess the the people set
up inside of a brokerage office?
Is it everybody is using cloneops, or maybe it's a specific
department dedicated to to AI,or maybe it's a lead in each
department. How do you sort ofenvision that from a best case
scenario, right? So

Unknown (26:02):
each each department has an admin manager that can
see everything going on with allthe agents, and then individuals
have their own login where theyhave their agent. I envision, if
you want an employee to be twoor three times more productive
than every single employee,should have a clone ops login.
And because you're going to belike I said the beginning,
you're going to be able to beable to come in eventually,

(26:23):
hopefully within, you know, onour roadmap, you know, we're,
you know, roughly 12 months awayfrom somebody coming in, turning
on their computer, their AI,goes to work and does everything
they do on a daily basis. So thefirst day you come in, you'll do
it, you'll deploy. A second dayyou'll do it. More by 30 days
in, it's going to knoweverything you do during the
day, and it's literally going todo it for you as it goes, as it
does it. And then it's going totell you, hey, you need to

(26:45):
handle this, pick up this, youneed to handle this, jump in on
this. And it's basically goingto just be a conductor that
tells you the things you need tohandle, like air traffic
control. Everything's goinggood, but here's a issue. Let me
jump on this issue and handleit, and then you're going to get
infinite more work done, becauseyou're just going to be handling
issues and handling issues andhandling crisis and putting out
fires, versus emailing a truckto find out if you deliver it

(27:07):
and being on hold waiting foryou know, try calling somebody
on a Monday try calling acarrier on a Monday morning and
find out where your truck is. Ifyou can't reach the driver, good
luck. You know, I'm saying likeyou're on hold forever, like
your customers on hold, and thensome dispatcher lies to you and
you can't prove it, so you stillcan't get your customer you
know, because everybody knows,just because dispatcher says it
doesn't mean it's real, so youcan't take his word for it,
because if you pass thatinformation on to your customer,

(27:29):
now you lied. If you lied toyou, you lied to your customer.
So it's very frustrating, likethe workflow. So what'll happen
now is you'll come in and AIwill do all these functions that
are normal every day, and thenyou'll be handling the fires,
and you'll be handling thecrisis, and you'll be handling
the interventions andescalations. What about,

what about, during some of your calls, I
imagine that you've gotten, youknow, a little bit of pushback,
probably, you know, I don'twant, you know, people, bots
taking people's jobs, or, youknow, bots talking to each
other. How do you handle, whatare some of those, I guess,
pushbacks that you get, andthen, how are you addressing
them?

Unknown (28:07):
And we're not even, you know, and I'm not an advocate of
taking jobs like, you know, Iwant to. I want to. I want to
make people more productive. Iwant to save the company money
if they have 100 people, andthey would scale to 200 people
this year because of growth, Iwant them to scale to 130 people
and deploy AI to right sizetheir business. Every company
has to have a right size theirbusiness where you have so many

(28:28):
people, so much technology, andthat's what I want to do. I want
to go in and have companiesright size their business, to
the right amount of humanpeople, the right amount of AI
and technology, and then justgrow both all of them like that,
because you're always going toneed people just don't want to
get rid of, get rid of the humantouch like we're never going to
do that because AI, the onething it can't do is replicate

(28:50):
the human touch. I mean, peopleare just people and and AI is
just programmed. So, you know,people aren't looking to just
displace people and get rid ofthem like that, but they are
looking to improve margins,improve EBIT, improve value,
improve productivity, and you'realways doing that right. Like,
as I said, I didn't havecompetition for Lean for five
years, and all of a sudden nowthat leans got 20 competitors.

(29:11):
Everybody wants to know howliens gonna do it cheaper and
better. So we would compare whenwe would onboard a customer in
2016 they were paying people60,000 here, and I think we were
charging 18,000 back then. Andbe like, let's do it. And we
could have charged them 25 theystill would said, Let's do it.
We could charge them 30. Theystill would have said, Let's do
it. So at the end of the day nowthey're like, 30. That's way too

(29:32):
much. Your competition is 220,like, so now we're getting beat
backwards instead of not caring.
So it's, it's, you know, it'sgoing to happen in the same way,
everybody is looking to deploysomething that works, do it
better. And now, how do you saveme money, and how do I use it
to, you know, to save and makemy money begin. And that's what
the evolution of almost all thisstuff is. And,

well, speaking of, you know, competition there,
there are several different, youknow, sort of the the AI voice,
cloning, things like that, thathave entered in. To the
logistics market. How do youdifferentiate yourself from the
rest of the pack? I

Unknown (30:05):
mean, there's a few, few differentiators, right? We
have some competitors that havesome good experience in
logistics and good contacts andhave histories of, you know, I
was probably one of the firstones to come in that had a
history of building a greatcompany and using that history
to roll into this. And nowthere's some others that have
come in that have builtincredible companies and billion

(30:26):
dollar companies, and they'renow, they're jumping into the
space. There's, there's enoughbusiness to go around. It's,
it's, and wouldn't you know, ourgoal isn't just to be in
logistics. You know, there's,there's tons of opportunities
from shippers and carriers andbrokers and forwarders. And so
there's a huge amount of ofspace here to conquer, and it it

(30:50):
can withstand many, many, many,many competitors, in my opinion,

yeah, it might.
I just the wheel startedturning. As soon as you you
mentioned forwarders with yourearlier comment on all of the
different languages that, youknow, there's a language barrier
right now, but probably not, youknow, in the in the near future,
using these different tools.

Unknown (31:08):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, you know. I mean, you got
things coming from all over theworld, in transit, and so it's,
you know. And at Lane, we had,we opened a forwarder division,
like 2016 and we have some ofthe biggest forwarders, you
know, work with lean and havehundreds of employees. So, you
know, we know that everybody'swilling to adopt what how can we
do it better? Because if you'rein business and you don't do

(31:29):
that, somebody else going to doit, and you you they have a
competitive edge, like, if yourcost goes down in any way, that
means you could bring your pricedown, and now you're competing
with prior everything reallycomes down to service and price
and quality. So if you canbreak, if your quality is there
and your service is there, thenwhat's your price? And if you're
equal in quality, equal inservice, but you're higher in

(31:49):
price, you're going to lose thebusiness like it's just that
simple. So you have to continueto evolve, to continue to keep
your cost down, be moreefficient, be more effective,
and you gotta have service andquality. And you know, I mean,
customers are everything, and Ievery business I build, and I
listen to the to the podcast,finally got to listen to it with
Andrew and his dad. And it's,you know, his dad's done

(32:09):
incredible things. He's alegend. And, you know, I, you
know, aspire to even be aquarter of the legend he is with
what I do. And when you, whenyou think about like his whole
thing was, we, we don't giveloads back. We take care of the
customer. And I've done that inevery business. I mean, I've
I've literally been loadingtrucks on Thanksgiving Day for
my customers. I've been withcustomers in my warehouse,

(32:32):
loading trucks out on Christmaslike, I've done so many things
on for my customers. There'snothing I won't do for them. And
you know, used to be like, Oh,family comes first. Yeah, it
does. But if you take care ofyour customer, customers, you're
automatically taking care ofyour family. I'm doing this to
take care of my family. Like,yeah, I'm missing Christmas
morning, or I'm missingThanksgiving, but I'm able to
provide for them because I havecustomers. If I don't have

(32:53):
customers, then you know that.
So it just flows. So I alwayslooked at I'm working hard, I'm
working 68 hours a week. I'mdoing anything I have to do for
customers, because I'm takingcare of my family and and that's
where we are now. You know, II've been successful, and I've
had success, and it all comesback to anybody that knows me.
Any customers knows me, there'snothing they won't do to make
sure he gets the job done foryou. Well, I'm

curious as you you brought it up, if you were
to start a brokerage today, howwould you build out a brokerage?

Unknown (33:20):
Oh, I never, I would never get into brokerage. Never,
ever, ever. Why would anybodywant to do that? Open a
brokerage today. It's insanecompetition. Like, it's, I mean,
it's, it's just, it's justinsane. How do you get business?
Like, it's like these, there'snot a shipper on the plate. You
have shipper CRM now, and youhave, like, the everybody knows
has everybody. They got yourhome. They got traffic managers

(33:43):
home number like you're they'regetting pounded by 50 people a
day wanting their business. Howdo you go get business like you
have to do RFPs. And you'redoing RFPs, you gotta have, I
mean, imagine to open abrokerage now, you have to have
credit, right? So to open abrokerage today, you're not
getting millions of dollars ofcredit from anybody. So if you
win an RFP, you're not gettingcredit from truckers like, and
then you gotta go get do RFPs.
You don't have pricing powerbecause you don't have trucks.

(34:05):
But, you know, saying, like, ifI was going to do anything, I
would open a trucking companytoday, and because I think
Trucking is going to is stillgoing to be robust for the next
two or three years, because somany have gone out of business
because of the last, you know,the last two years have been
terrible, and I think all theCOVID monies ran out, or
wherever they got this money tosurvive, because truckers
usually went out of business twomonths after they had no money.

(34:25):
They didn't last 678, months. Idon't know where they've gotten
the money, or how they've doneit, or what subsidies or
government waste and fraud wenton to give trucking companies
all this money to survive, butit's pretty much come to the
end, and they're going out ofbusiness every day, in droves.
So if I was going to doanything, I would probably open
a trucking company, start thetrucking company, build that,

(34:46):
and then spin off a logisticsoff of it after I was running,
you know, 50 or 100 trucks,because it's just opening pure
Logistics is, you know, or or Iwould go look for a big, a big
shipper to partner with. I gofind, you know, there's. Several
people have opened theirbrokerage by saying, Hey, I'll
tell you what I'll do. I'll makeyou 50% partner in my brokerage.
Give me your business. You'llget a rebate every year and go

(35:06):
find, go find a owner of a hugeowner of a company that shipped
millions of dollars afraid ayear. And I would say, you want
to be my partner. I mean, that'sabout all you can do, right?
Because just pure selling forthe businesses, I'm a salesman.
I like closing, but it's likefishing, right? People say you
like fishing. I'm like, take mea fish for bass, where I can
catch a fish or or fish off areef, or I can catch a fish

(35:28):
every two minutes I'm in. Idon't want to troll for five
hours trying to catch a fish andend up with nothing. So same,
same with sales. I want to havehigh closing rates and success.
I don't want to close one.
That's why real estate's sotough, right? Where they say,
like, 80% of the realtors don'tclose a transaction in a year.
Like, it's crazy. Numbers. Like,why would anybody want to be a

(35:48):
realtor? Like, like, it'sinsane. Like, I want to close, I
need to do a sale a day. Or,like, I'm depressed.

Well, I am.
Does bring up another curiousquestion that I have? Like, if
is there any logistics businessthat's been started maybe in the
last like five years, thatyou've thought, Man, I that's a
great idea. That's the future.
Obviously, not a brokerage. Butare there any other aspects, or
maybe silos within logisticsthat you think still have good
business opportunities outside?

Unknown (36:16):
I think, I think the, I think the digital brokerage was
pretty cool. And I think thatthat was something like a, like,
a marketplace like, you know,similar, you know, to some of
the ones that are out there. Ithink convoy going out of
business. I think they just overleverage themselves with funding
and didn't do enough. And, andlisten, Flexport just picked up
the convoy model. I thinkthey're going to do incredible

(36:37):
things with that. Like we, youknow, we were talking and, and I
made sure they were introducedto lean, because I think lean
has a ton of small brokerage,you know, with five people or
less that could really use thatleverage power to buy. So I
think they're going to do greatthings with that convoy platform
and, you know, and Flexport. Ithink it was brilliant of Ryan
buying it and getting it at ahuge discount and deploying it
the way he did. And so, like,that's pretty cool. And, but I

(36:58):
don't really know too many, andI thought I saw somebody
launching LTL reefer. Reeferbrokerage was cool. I actually
like the flock freight modelfrom that's, I think they're
within five years old, right?
They built an incrediblecompany, and short period it's a
billion dollar company. And so Ilike their model. I think
anything that has to do withopen source, allowing shippers,
brokers, carriers, everybody, togo to a one place and and not

(37:23):
have to have all these people inthe middle making money for
doing stuff is probably whateverybody would like to get to.
But it's so fragmented and and,you know, and large and scale of
the players, it's not like catchup, where you have Hines and
hunts, you know, it's like, orthe railways, where you have
like, five different railroadsand you're stuck. So trucking
just has so many, so manyoptions, and so many people are

(37:45):
willing to do it for nothing, ordo it for a loss or loss leader
business. So it's just, it'sjust hard to do it, and
logistics and trucking, butthere's some cool things that
have come out in the last fewyears in logistics that you know
are, I think, are going to bearound and they're not going
anywhere.

What do you think holds a lot of logistics
companies back when it comes toimplementing new technology? Ai,
solutions, things like that. Asyou're having a lot of these
conversations, I imagine thatthere's some companies that just
probably aren't a good fit, andthey got to, you know, maybe
clean up their own sort of housebefore they start shopping for a
new one. What are you seeing inthe market when it comes to

(38:22):
technology and AI, yeah,

Unknown (38:24):
the biggest barriers are cost and bandwidth, right?
Like, if they have an ITdepartment, they're most, most
likely buried and don't havetime to do it. And if you're
dealing most brokeragesnowadays, they're under
tremendous pressure to, youknow, improve EBITDA, because
it's been such a, you know, showfor the last two years, on, on
the economy and trucking. Solast thing they want to do is,

(38:46):
you know, if you're big and goto the board and say, We're
gonna spend a million dollars inAI, and then, you know, they're
like, You're nuts. We, you knowyou're not make, you need to
make money. Like, so it's, it'salways a battle. And what's,
what's, what's always beencurious to me, is, like, in
logistics, is such a thin marginbusiness like I think maybe
average EBIT of margins might beseven to 11% and other

(39:06):
businesses are 25% and 30% soit's such a small margin, if you
like, take a brokerage that does10 million, right? They're
making they're lucky if they'remaking 700,000 and then they
gotta pay themselves 150 andthey gotta pay their account by
time you do all it, and you go,Look, how much do I have left to
invest into my business? And youhire one good salesperson. It's

(39:26):
150,000 so you hire five salespeople. You know, in order to
get sales grow, you have to havesales and marketing. So when you
look at, how do we don't makeenough money to have a full
blown marketing team and a salesteam and a sales manager and a
CRO like, it's just there's notenough meat on the bone, like to
really scale a business theright way, so you have to just
lose a shit ton of money for twoyears. And that's been the

(39:49):
model. That's been the model,right in the last 789, years
this, everybody's jumped in.
They've lost millions of dollarsuntil they got market share, and
then they scale it back and makeit profitable. And, you know,
that's. What a lot, that's whata lot of the bigger ones did in
the last five years. So all thebig brokers you have out there
kind of followed that model,and, and, but most brokers are
like opening up with, you know,on a shoestring and a shoestring

(40:09):
budget, and, you know, doing itthemselves. And I remember, when
I opened my brokerage, I fundedmy brokerage was funded with
payables. I owe people money,and I sprung them out 40 days.
And that's how I, you know,because people paid me at 38 and
that's how I grew my brokerageand, and everybody would say,
Oh, you're good, you know,you're what you know, you how do
you grow so fast? And I'm, like,because I was able to, you know,

(40:30):
my payables grow fast. I can't,I can only, I'm always good as
my payables, like, that's,that's my line of credit.
Because, you know, you don'topen up and get a line of credit
from a brokerage. You know youfactor, but you also have to,
like, you have people like, tryon pay now that help brokerages
pay and get part of that quickpay there that that platform is
amazing. And some of the otherones, the factor companies out
there, like OTR, has a payment,payment process and for brokers

(40:51):
now too. And so adopting thatmodel has also been helpful for
brokers to grow as well, becausethe ar, ar funding is, like, I
think, the biggest, the biggesthurdle and brokerages is it's
very difficult to get your ARfunded. And if you do, it's just
your margin. It's not your wholebut back when I started
brokerage, I got to use my wholepayables to fund and people were
more flexible back then. Youknow, if you paid, I did a lot

(41:12):
of LTL, and the LTL carries gaveyou 6090, days to pay before
they screen bloody murder. Sothey didn't, you know, they were
used to it. So like I was ableto grow and build because I was
just able to manage my payables

and so, yeah, obviously, with your wealth of
knowledge and history and workethic and inside of logistics,
I'm curious as to, you know, thebootstrapped founders that are
getting started this year ormaybe next month, what advice
would you give to them onbuilding in sort of this down
market that we're experiencing.

Unknown (41:45):
Wow, yeah, advice is tough, you know, it's, I mean,
because so many different thingswork for different people,
right? Like, you know, it's sopeople. People are their
personality and their character,and that's and they do things
the way they do it. I would justsay, like, you know, understand
your financial model very well,because I've seen so many people

(42:06):
come build things that have nofinancial scale, scalability.
Like, you know, even if you gotto there, how much money you're
going to make? Well, I don'tknow. Well, if you don't know
that, that's that's like thegasoline that goes in the car to
get you on on the road, tofollow the map like you need to
know. You need to understandyour financial future and where

(42:26):
you're going to go with it, andhow much it's going to cost and
how much you're going to makingwhen you get there. And that was
a cool thing I did about Lean.
What when I when I launched leanand and launched it with Robert
Cadena. I had my model, and Ihad somebody from the call
center industry send it to me inExcel. So all I had to do was
plug in one seat, 10 seat, 100seats, 1000 seats, 10,000 seats,
and it and it gave an enterprisevalue. And I thought it was

(42:48):
wrong, because I plugged in 100seats and 1000 seats, and I
plugged in 10,000 seats, it hadover a billion dollars of
enterprise value. I'm like, whatI could do 10,000 seats, like
might take me five years. Butlike, if I get a customer today
and a customer tomorrow, fiveseats, 10 seats, 50 seats, 100
seats, 200 seats, 500 seats, andeverybody's growing 10, 10% I
did the math. I'm like, I thinkI can get there in three to five

(43:09):
years. And, and it was justincredible. And like, that was
the driver. Like, that was whatI believed in, that got us to
10,000 seats in a billion dollarvalue. Like, it's that. So if
you don't have that, and that'swhat I did, similar here at
clone ops, I did each talkingminute, each customer, each
user. And I feel like I canbuild another billion dollar
company, because I think I canhave 1000 active users with a

(43:31):
billion talking minutes. And ifI do that, I built a billion
dollar company and like that. Ifyou don't have that vision and
that, like, that's, I think thatfor me, that was a start. Like,
I said, Everybody's different,and everybody you know is going
to have something different thatthey look at based on their
personality and drive andenergy. And people say, I got a
lot of energy, but I don't know,I drink too much Celsius or Red

(43:52):
Bull, but, but at the end of theday, I think that is the single
most important, is the vision ofwhere you're going to be. And I
think vision is like criticalfor everything, everything I've
ever believed in and really,truly believed, not just fake
believed, if I've reallybelieved it has come true for
me. And so I've told everybody,just, just find that, make sure
you can believe in it, andbelieve in it like and and if

(44:14):
you put it on paper and you seeit and it makes sense, then you
believe in it. So like

having the vision and the financial acumen
to see the vision come to life.
Alright, last we got a few moreminutes left here. Anything that
you feel is important to mentionabout clone ops that we haven't
already talked about.

Unknown (44:34):
Oh, man, my brain's so fried. Worked this hard, and
since dispensing trucks, um,listen, I just think we built a
great team. I think we're up to18 or 19 people now. We've we're
adding some great industrypeople that you know are young
and energetic and enthusiasticabout what we're doing, and,
and, and there's a lot of othergreat companies out there too.

(44:56):
So like this, I just companiesshould, should do their
diligence. Look. At everybody,and then pick the right company
that's the best fit for you inevery way and and we just like
to get in there and have a spotto compete for that. And we're
going to lose, we lose a lot ofbusiness. We're going to win a
lot of business. And there's andthe people that are getting into
the business, I know them welland like them. They're very good
friends of mine, and some of ushave done things together, and

(45:17):
I'm rooting for them too, andI'm just happy there's so much
business out there and so much,so much room to grow and do, and
we're all going to prosper andsucceed. And if we could
deliver, what if we can deliverhalf the vision we all have of
what we could do in logisticswith AI, it's going to, it's
going to be amazing. Yeah,

I think that's really well said, because
there's a lot of, you know, sortof doom and gloom about the
industry and just about theworld in general, but there's,
there's, to me, it's, it's,you're missing the forest for
the trees, because there'sopportunities everywhere. And if
you have the vision and thefinancial acumen, as you just
mentioned, then you can, you canfind those opportunity spots and
really be able to buildsomething great in what this new

(45:56):
information era that we findourselves in. So So David,
really appreciate your timehere. I'll be sure to link to
your, you know, LinkedIn, clone,ops, all that good stuff in the
show notes. Any last party wordsfor the audience?

Unknown (46:10):
No, listen, I think everybody should have a good
outlook on the future. I thinkthings are good, and we're,
we're going to adapt to whatevercomes our way, like we've been
doing for 1000 years and andeverybody's going to be fine.
And AI is not gonna, not gonnachange much other than the way
we think about things and dothings so like and I'm happy to
be a part of it. So absolutely

David, thank you so much. All right, thanks.
That's your signal right there.
I hope you enjoyed this episodeof everything is logistics, a
podcast for the thinkers infreight, telling the stories
behind how your favorite stuffand people get from point A to
B. Subscribe to the show. Signup for our newsletter and follow
our socials over at everythingis logistics.com and in addition

(46:51):
to the podcast, I also wanted tolet you all know about another
company I operate, and that'sdigital dispatch, where we help
you build a better website. Now,a lot of the times, we hand this
task of building a new websiteor refreshing a current one off
to a co worker's child, aneighbor down the street or
stranger around the world, whereyou probably spend more time

(47:12):
explaining the freight industrythan it takes to actually build
the dang website. Well, thatdoesn't happen at Digital
dispatch. We've been buildingonline since 2009 but we're also
early adopters of AI automationand other website tactics that
help your company to be acentral place, to pull in all of
your social media posts, recruitnew employees and give potential

(47:32):
customers a glimpse into how youoperate your business. Our new
website builds start as low as$1,500 along with ongoing
website management, maintenanceand updates starting at $90 a
month, plus some bonus freightmarketing and sales content
similar to what you hear on thepodcast, you can watch a quick
explainer video over on digitaldispatch.io, just check out the

(47:55):
pricing page once you arrive,and you can see How we can build
your digital ecosystem on astrong foundation. Until then, I
hope you enjoyed this episode.
I'll see you all real soon andgo jags. You.

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