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 some solutions apart from competitors.
“For a lot of 3PLs and brokers, your emails are always 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,” Bell 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.”
Innovative AI solutions, Bell says, will help rightsize logistics operations by giving the best employees the opportunity to do more and be more productive in their workflows.
AI, meanwhile, will handle 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, AI voice agents are changing the game with their 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 his experience and understanding of the industry’s challenges have helped him build an effective 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.”
Bell was able to quickly gain support in his new venture, he 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.
“Because we understand the challenges that the industry is facing, we’ve been able to focus on not only streamlining workflows, but also fighting fraud with 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. “Combined with 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.
According to Bell, the next step for freight tech industry professionals 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. “I have a track record of winning for everybody that’s on my team, and now people know to get in early with me.”
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 be successful,” Bell said. “Credibility and trust are the kind of things you can’t buy.”
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