When it comes to new freight industry technology, particularly AI tools, much of the functionality is identical from provider to provider. The fine margins between various companies’ service and product capabilities often make the difference between which organizations are successful and which ones fall into obscurity.
David Bell, founder and CEO of CloneOps.ai, sat down with John Kingston, editor-at-large for FreightWaves, to discuss what exactly sets CloneOps.ai apart from competitors.
“Essentially, CloneOps.ai is a tool for managing high-level and high-volume communications, typically in logistics,” Bell explained. “Your emails are stacking up, your phone calls are on hold, your voicemail is getting full, you’re losing texts in your feed, and you’re a one-person show trying to keep your head above water,” he said.
After a career that involved many years of juggling these functions himself, Bell says he wanted to help other professionals do what he’d always wished he could do: clone himself.
“If you could clone your best people, you’d be way more successful,” Bell said. “In logistics, you have your really high performers and your low performers, but you never get rid of the low performers fast enough because you don’t know who is going to replace them.”
To help rightsize logistics operations, CloneOps.ai gives the best employees the opportunity to do more and be more productive in their workflows, while AI handles the routine emails, texts, calls and redundant functions. That force multiplier allows the professionals to handle exceptions, solve problems, and focus on crisis management and critical, customer-facing issues.
Bell compares the advent of generative AI to the invention of voice over internet protocol (VoIP). “The only reason my former company, Lean Solutions, was able to have so much success in nearshoring was because of VoIP and the ability to use local-based phone numbers,” he said. “No one would call a foreign number.”
In the same way, CloneOps.ai is changing the game with its intuitive ability to have a conversation and answer questions.
“Before our AI, robust voicemail and phone tree automation was about the best anyone could do to manage high-volume calls,” Bell said. “For that to work, you have to have very well-developed scripts, because you couldn’t get any answer unless it was already scripted. Now, the ability to have thinking, interactive conversations is a game changer.”
With generative AI exploding into the logistics space, Bell is confident that CloneOps.ai stands out as a top solution in an industry crowded with options.
“When you look at freight transportation and logistics in general, all the brokers pretty much do the same thing,” he said. “It’s highly saturated and difficult to get customer acquisition, because potential clients get calls from people all day long, and on the surface they all say the same things.”
Private investors are backing CloneOps.ai, Bell says, due to his experience and his credibility in the industry. “I understand how to do every job from my 25 years in logistics, from booking to track-and-trace to counting collections,” Bell said.
Bell formerly owned Smith-Cargo Transportation, the largest partial load consolidator in Florida, California and New York. By successfully consolidating freight for over 20 years, Bell says, he built up trust in every sector of the industry.
His next venture, Lean Solutions, grew from 250 employees to over 10,000 during his tenure. His expertise in everything from brokering to nearshoring means that Bell understands intimately how logistics works at every step in the supply chain, and as a result he has contacts all over the world.
“Aside from my experience, the other things that differentiate us are our dashboard with live takeover technology and our Voice ID authentication system,” Bell said.
Voice ID prevents some of the most prevalent kinds of freight fraud by identifying fake carriers and brokers over the phone. The system can identify whether or not a caller is authorized to speak and book a load on behalf of a carrier.
“Part of the carrier setup process will now involve a voice authentication key,” Bell said. “On top of other tools for vetting carriers, this will cut down on the major types of fraud we see now.”
Scammers are bypassing security measures in a variety of ways. Many shippers and brokers verify that incoming truck drivers are who they claim to be, but Bell says that’s only a small part of the problem.
“With freight fraud, the driver is usually real,” Bell said. “It’s a real carrier going to pick the load up. There’s probably never a fake carrier putting fake signs on a truck. The problem is when they deliver a load for a criminal who stole a real broker’s identity.”
With Voice ID, if the caller is not authorized when they first speak, the system does not allow them to book or even get any information.
This feature is now working and integrated into the CloneOps.ai dashboard, and the next step will be to create a database of bad actors.
“Now any time someone is flagged as a bad actor, we can send that information and their voice to other platforms that do fraud prevention,” Bell said. “The more we can contribute to fighting these kinds of fraud and the more that other businesses do the same, the more we can all collaborate to weed out the bad actors.”
Following on voice and email management’s early utilization of AI, Bell speculates that the next major use case for AI in logistics will be streamlining integration.
“Right now, AI tools are each integrated with their own systems,” Bell said. “Soon, these systems will be able to talk with each other and expedite the process of integration without a shared API.”
The integration process often takes considerable time and effort, and that adds up to significant costs for businesses that need to integrate various TMS and other software. Instead of those manual integrations, AI will likely be able to seamlessly adapt all the information.
“The next phase will look something like the change from wired internet connections to Wi-Fi,” Bell said. “Now there’s Wi-Fi everywhere, and with technology like Starlink, you can literally connect anywhere.”
According to Bell, AI will replace APIs and make it easier for all the data in disparate systems to work together. “You’ll be able to just start doing business with other organizations instantly, without having to go through API connection,” Bell said.
As for CloneOps.ai’s place in this next era, Bell attributes the company’s momentum to not only his own experience, but also that of his team.
“The incredible team I’m building is an understated element of our success,” Bell said. “As we continue to bring in big names in the industry, that will only continue to set us apart from competitors more and more. I have a track record of winning for everybody that’s on my team, and now the best people know to get in early with me. We’re going to be successful, and we’re going to win.”
Too many businesses, Bell says, underestimate how important people are.
“You can have all the tech in the world, and if you don’t have the people who are trusted and have credibility in the industry, you won’t outcompete the other companies,” Bell said. “Credibility and trust are the kind of things you can’t buy.”
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