Transcript for "Loft LIVE: Transportation & Logistics Teams":
Hey. Good morning, everybody. This is Sri Manganpalli. I'm the vice president for digital transformation solutions here at FourKites. We welcome you all. Thank you so much for joining our first ever loft live webinar. This webinar is gonna be focused on the transportation, and logistics side of supply chain. And then in the future, we're gonna continue to have additional loft, related webinars for our audience. Along with me, I have Scott De Groot. Scott is was the senior transportation executive for Kimberly Clark. He's one of the most recognized consumer goods companies in the world. And, Scott's managed very, very complex logistics and transportation, departments at Kimberly Clark. After that, Scott's transitioned to University of Tennessee. He's now, learning an academy program there, training future executives, and supply chain professionals on, supply chain, related technologies, supply chain related practices. So it's a very good transition. So Scott brings an amazing balance of for both sides, one from the industrial practic practitioner standpoint, and then two from the, from the academic standpoint. Welcome, Scott. Thank you for joining us. Hey, Shree. It's it's a great pleasure, and, I really enjoy these conversations and working with your team. So I'm excited about what we're gonna get into today. Thank you. Awesome. Scott, if you could take a minute or two, maybe could share if you could share you a little bit about yourself, your background, that'd be fantastic, and then I'll I'll move to Shana as well. Yeah. No. Great. Love to. So as you said, my name is Scott DeGroot. I'm currently on the faculty at the University of Tennessee in the supply chain department, where I also am the managing director of the Global Supply Chain Institute. So the Global Supply Chain Institute is, we have over 75 partner companies who partner with us in the academic department, to really act as a hub for learning, recruiting, and, researching supply chain topics. I'm also an advisor, as you say, for FourKites. Prior to that, I spent thirty eight years at Kimberly Clark, traveled all over the world, lived all over the world, 14 different places, started out, running a forklift in the distribution center as hourly worker, and I ended my career thirty eight years later as vice president of all planning and logistics for the company globally. And it was during that time where I, was able to experience, the power of first, you know, transportation visibility and then, you know, control tower and intelligent control tower and now the use of Majentik. So it's really cool to be with you again, Sri. And, Shannon knows I love working with her as well, so I appreciate the few minutes. Oh, thank you so much, Scott. And that gives a great transition to introduce, Shanna Hebert to the audience. Shanna has been an industry veteran. She's been, doing this for thirty years now. So she's seen, the industry itself transform from a lot of manual processes that several supply chain professionals used to go through several decades ago to the SaaS world and now the agentic AI world. So she can provide some amazing credibility around how transformation looks like, how the world has transformed. Along with that, today, she's also going to, give us a view into the Loft platform, share with us how easy it is to, put together a workflow using our Loft platform with the help of our AI agent, Sophie. So she's gonna cover that as well. Shanna, welcome to the webinar, and we're looking forward to this conversation. Absolutely. Great introduction. Thank you. Once again, Shanna Abare. I'm a principal solution advisor for Kites, and I work with a lot of our large customers. So we've been doing a lot of these transformative, activities with Intelligent Control Tower all the way from, you know, supplier inbound where it's kind of most of our customers are dabbling in and then expanding all the way to Dynamic Yarns. So really excited to be able to do this demo for our customers and, you know, future customers, today. Thanks, Sherry. Thank you so much, Shanna. We we are looking forward to this conversation for sure. So, we'll we'll get started. This whole webinar is gonna be divided into two parts. The first part would be a conversational, aspect of it where, we'll have, Scott and Shanna share with us a little bit of, the industry perspectives associated with agents and AI and how is the industry thinking about it. As Scott mentioned, he leads our customer advisory board as well. So he brings a lot of those customer perspectives along with the industry perspectives from the University of Tennessee. So we'll talk a little bit about that. And then we'll transition to, to what everybody's waiting waiting for, which is, Shanna's, magic around how we can create agentic workflows in a matter of minutes. So you'll see that live. Thank you so much, for all the audience for providing your input, in terms of, where you would like to which workflows you would like to automate. So we we couldn't do them all, but we'll pick one. And, you always have the opportunity to contact us, and we can definitely schedule separate, sessions to walk you through some additional workflows if you need it. So with that said, Scott, I have a few questions for you and, like to learn a little bit about your perspectives around these. I know you ran the logistics function at Kimberly Clark. You had peers outside the logistics role, depending on how your daily operations played out. What did what did that look like? What what did these, other, peers and other departments in supply chain, what did they look from you? How did that whole interaction happen? Yeah. No. It's a great question. And, of course, it's it's in my experience, Kimberly Clark, and I think this is true at a lot of companies. If you're in logistics or planning or logistics or anywhere in the supply chain, you're you're gonna have people in front of you in the value chain and people behind you and people all around you. It's a really a circular system. For me, for our team, we we had to think about delivery first. Like, it's all about execution at the end of the day. Normally, logistics transportation specifically is one of the biggest variable spends at every company. So they're stakeholder number one. How do you drive efficiency and effectiveness? Basically, lowering costs and increasing productivity. So commitment to the shareholders, commitment to the CFO, commitment to leadership team. And then we have a commitment on the other side, generally speaking, of growing revenue. And, of course, everyone wants growth. And that generally, the brand teams and the sales teams and the customers that pay the bill. So, you know, for us, and I think for a lot of people, the tray it's not a trade off. The work is to optimize how do I deliver the most amount of service to deliver revenue growth, you know, to sell more items. If the truck doesn't ship, you don't get the sale. And then to lower that cost. And and and I think about from an executional standpoint in logistics, most of the supply chain is like this. It's three it's twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Every week, every month, every year, it just continues. So you have to execute at a really high level. And one of the things, Shari, that I'll finish this part of my answer by saying, I find that working with when you can work in a positive way with the sales and the brand community, the commercial teams, and with customers, then things get a lot easier. So having that mindset of daily execution, solving customers' problems, ensuring your product is on the shelf is a really a great way to start. And, in many cases, that's where my my mindset would start. How can we help the customer be better today? Awesome. That's that's great. Thank you so much, Scott, for sharing that. Just just as a follow-up to that, I haven't heard of a a CEO that is not interested in growth so far. Right? So, as as as you have seen technology evolve throughout your career, at, at Kimberly Clark and then now at University of Kent University of Tennessee, just let please tell me a little bit about what are some major tools that you have seen helped you achieve those goals in the past? How are those tools evolving as you go forward? And as you have progressed in your career, how did that growth mindset and and meeting that core growth because at the end of the day, executing to that growth is a huge challenge, right, as logistics professionals. How did how did these tools help you scale, you know, and and manage those aspects? Right. Right. No. It's a great question. And what you know, I don't think there's any one answer, so I'll just share my own experience. Certainly, the that you have to deliver outcomes. Like, we don't we're we're not in the business of just starting up tools. We wanna deliver outcomes. So we wanna reduce, OTIF fines and improve service for on shelf delivery. So what do we need? And this is how we we need to have visibility. Where are all the trucks moving out? And when are they gonna be at big at our customers because they wanna know. So we have visibility. Okay. Then we ask the next question. How do we get visibility in? Because I'm bringing stock in and out across a very complex networks. I want view of all the things coming in to match up with the things going up. Now I can improve service and improve on shelf availability, and then that leads to the next question. If I can see things moving in and out, then I can start to direct the work inside of the four walls of the distribution center or the factory in a more intelligent way. So what I've just described sort of our Kimberly Clark's progress on, let's see things, Mhmm. and then let's improve problems, and then let's start improving the solution. So, once we could see the inbound and the outbound, then we start bringing this intelligence as you say. And that intelligence then starts to ask ourselves, well, now can I see into the into the warehouse management system and into the planning system and into the receiving system? And those kind of well, what did it take? It took human beings. Right? Oh, the human being from here. Human from here. Well, human beings, I don't have enough of them. Well, we don't have enough time. So I think now that it it starts to unfold into I can give myself time by using agent of workflows, right, to eliminate some of this transactional work and recast the people into more value added things like solving a production flow problem or, you you know, decreasing dwell time at a big customer. So I think that's, you know, what let let me summarize by saying, yes. We saw things, outbound flow, then we saw inbound flow, then we started improving the work, then we started making intelligent decisions, and then we started to free up people's time so they can work more strategically. And and I think, you know, what what Fort Heights has done is met met customers along the way. Visibility, yes. Intelligent control tower, yes. Now let us give you back the gift of time by working on a gentle workflows and radically improve your effectiveness. No. That's that make sense, Shri? yeah. It makes a lot of sense, Scott. Thank you so much for sharing, those insights. Maybe I'll turn to Shanna for a bit here. Shanna, I know you meet and talk to customers on a daily basis, and almost everyone gets this There are two mandates. Right? How do you meet the growth, and then how do you leverage AI? We we keep hearing this from customers all the time. How do you see like, what what kind of advice are you giving, customers on on these modern tools? Right? Because these modern tools, one decade ago, what's modern is different from what's modern today. Even things are different from what they were two years ago, right, from an AI standpoint. So maybe if you could shed some light on what kind of advice are you giving today in terms of how to leverage the modern tools to support growth and other initiatives for the supply chain professionals? I mean, that's a great question. I've had to go back a little bit because when we start with real time visibility, right, people implemented real time visibility and then they said, wow. I didn't realize I had that many exceptions. Right? So now we have now that we can see the exceptions, people are saying, Yeah. I can't, you know, we're focusing on exceptions as they come up, as they become, you know, we're made aware of them. What AI is able to do is reach out and find out about exceptions, you know, before they happen or when they're happening, and it can get down to every level without someone waiting for an email to come in, waiting for something to happen. AI agents, can take that work, you know, of the exceptions, go through the exceptions, find answers, you know, whatever the answer is and provide information back, you know, and and escalate what are the important things that my team need to be focused on, today. So, you know, we find that real time visibility, you know, adds a lot of exceptions, but also agents can get down even further into those exceptions and resolve them or bring them to an end. So definitely transformative. I think that, you know, one important thing that I've been really impressed with, I've I've had the pleasure of working with product and engineering pretty closely since. AIAs have rolled out, but also, you know, Fourcade's ability to keep growing the technology and expanding it because it's constantly changing every day. So I've seen that, and that's what AltLoft is all about. We're gonna show, you know, what we're evolving into and that we're gonna invest and keep changing with with the technology. Awesome. Thank you so much, Shannon. Thanks for sharing those perspectives for sure. Scott, I'm I'm gonna put you back on the spot here for a bit here. So I know you've been a a transportation executive, for, majority majority of your carrier. Say, today, you're also advising a lot of chief supply chain officers in the space of, supply chain and transformation and technology. If, let's say, today, you are advising a chief supply chain officer on what should they do, where should they focus their energy, where should they focus their budget. Right? That energy and budget because there are so many conflicting priorities that the chief supply chain officer has to go through. Maybe could you. put yourself in their shoes and maybe guide them on how should they think different today. compared to maybe even one year ago or two years ago? Yeah. No. It's it's a great question. I mean, the I think the the way I think about it, Sri, is to, well, kinda let's start with real problems that are actually happening in the in the, in the operation. Yes. And we have a vision who the company wants to be and our product road map and our technology road map to support the product road map and all that. And and you'll have a long term view, of course, of what your fiscal footprint is. But when you start to allocate dollars and resources and time against problems, you have to put some wins on the board. And put some wins on the board to create this virtual cycle of funding the next round of improvements and so on and so forth, you know, as you grow the business. And so real problems that can affect the p and l today, this month, this quarter, this year. And as I mentioned before, let's start with those. Where where are constraints in the flow of my inbound and outbound production? Where are customer orders not flowing through? Where do I pay, you know, money to outside the company writing checks to carriers for dwell time and detention time? Where where am I shutting down plants because I don't have the right inbound flow? These problems, again, in the total supply chain often have a transportation or logistics variable. Let's get after solving those problems first. And, you know, I know many people will struggle, and I think it's maybe valid to have a discussion about, my internal team will develop, you know, the right, infrastructure and develop some agents based on our data that we have, but that takes time. You know, my view is let's let's buy what we can from someone who's already the best in the business, got the entire network lit up. So I advise supply chain, leaders, solve real problems consistent with your long term road map. Two, get started now. Don't wait for perfect data. Three, partner with someone who's the best in the industry three, that, that I that I mentioned when I talk to people. Gotcha. No. That's fantastic. And I love what you said about getting some wins because the wins will help fund future programs in that space. Right? Scott, based on your conversations with our customers as part of the customer advisory board or outside, what are you hearing as potential roadblocks to these wins? What what are you hearing as potential, challenges that are stopping from having these quick wins in in in their in the industry. Yeah. I think I think a lot of people, as you mentioned before, Shari, have so many, transformative initiatives that are on their plate that they get a little bit distracted from solving real problems. I think that's number one. Number two, I think a lot of, many companies are struggling with application versus theory when it comes to AI or agentic rolling out agentic workflows or building, datasets that help improve the business. They're they're sort of caught in a philosophic philosophical argument versus let's just start get started and learn by doing, you know, building the plane as you're flying, which I always thought was odd saying, like but, anyways, they should get started. Yeah. And then I think the third thing is, really making sure that, we're using the data and the partner network like like four clients have, to really solve practical problems. So let's not boil the ocean. Let's get started. So those are three things, that I would say. Also, that's go ahead, Krishna. I was gonna say if I could add to that. I think that's a those are really good points because what we've seen, you know, within four kites is customers have started with, you know, some some standard workflows, and then they keep expanding one once they see that value. So quick wins, let the organization see the value, on those AI agents and the and the standard workflows, and then you can roll out to more customized workflows that are really tailored to your business. But I I like the idea of quick wins. I think. that's a good point, Scott. Yeah. And as as a follow-up to that thank you, Scott. Thanks, Shanna, for sharing that. Shanna, may may I ask you based on your conversations with customers, just curious. I'm sure this whole infrastructure you let's use our own, ways to build this versus buying from outside comes up a lot. Right? Could you could you maybe share why customers are, you know, eventually moving to maybe a buy decision versus a build decision, especially as it applies to transportation and logistics kind of use cases? Yeah. I think I think customers want want to, you know, have control. Typically, they wanna have control of those workflows, and and it's understandable. So in some decisions, you know, we do have customers that have workflows and have bots, but they don't do everything that they need them to do. And they're set within their organization where, you know, we're built on top of a, you know, intelligent control tower. So we have all of those signals and triggers that we'll be talking about that are already built into the system that can can, you know, help manage these work flows and set them up. The other thing is once you buy technology and you buy, you know, you have that technology, you can upgrade, but, you know, is that really your what you wanna do if you're a CPG comp company or your electronics company, manufacturing? You know, you wanna focus on supply chain and not, you know, building, technology and and supporting technology over a long time. Gotcha. And I think there's quicker value too by going with a partner like FourKites. We can we'll show you with Loft. We're gonna implement very quickly, with these new tools. And then also, you know, you usually have, like, an eighteen month cycle time to get new tools if you buy. So, you know, buy versus build, I mean, sorry, I said that backwards. Buy versus build, just a shorter time to get things implemented if you buy. Gotcha. And and and I just put myself in in the shoes of some of these executives. Right? I I'm I'm sure they get they get the pressure of saying, hey. Let's build it in house. I already have a budget allocated for it. Let me go with, an existing capability because everybody's talking about agentic workflows. And these days, it's it's it seems easy to build the agentic workflows. But then let's say I built that agent with that workflow. What I'm what am I training that agent with? Because the first shipment that I use with that workflow is the first shipment that is gonna train that agent. Right? Versus if you have an an existing technology that's being used to monitor more than three and a half million shipments a day, the training cycle is much more accelerated than if I'm building that workflow from scratch and using it. Right? The other thing is where is the data coming from? Because at the end of the day, I don't have information around weather. I don't have information around terminals. I don't have information around traffic. I don't have information if there is a labor strike or a geopolitical situation or, a straight of hormones that's closed or a Panama Canal that's been in on drought. I mean, the list goes on. And without that data training these AI agents, how good is that agentic workflow? How reliable is it? Do you wanna bet your customer's delivery, your OTIF, on an agent that's built in house that's not being trained on real world situations? That's the big question mark that keeps bothering me. Maybe I'll open up any comments, Shanna, from you or Scott on this? I completely agree. And you like you said, we have 3,500,000 shipments going through. You know, I I I will even mention that, before we do the webinar, most of the customers that submitted workflows are actually workflows we already have. So for this session, we already have these workflows active and they're standard workflow. That was an interesting find for us. The things that people are asking for are the workflows that we have because we have that industry knowledge already there. I think it's a good point. Thank you. Yeah. I I agree, of course. And, I would also add that that would to the the executives and supply chain leaders out there, you know, don't be too proud. You know? Don't don't be too proud about what you might think you can do yourself. Hey. You know, let's go and partner with the best of breed company who's already got huge scale and, just stop putting some money in our pocket because your competitors are sure we're lucky to put money in their pocket. So let's put some money in our pocket. No. That's that's great point for sure, Scott. So, Scott, maybe I'll come back to you with a quick question. You've hired a lot of professionals during your career. Now you're training some of the brightest minds in supply chain as part of your academic career. Maybe if you could shed some light as in how is that skill set of a professional supply chain professional? What was it, say, five years ago, ten years ago? What would you hire for in terms of the capabilities and the and the skills? Versus today, what would you be looking for in a supply chain professional if you're hiring someone into that kind of a role, especially in the transportation logistics. space? Yeah. I think historically good question. Historically, we would look for, you know, functional experts, someone who understood category management or supplier strategy and procurement, or someone who who knows, you know, technical infrastructure and OEE optimization manufacturing or transportation analysts. Today, what what we see people needing and what we're recommending is we need people with a strong foundation across all aspects of supply chain, plan, source, make, and deliver, and. we need people who are comfortable using tools and data to drive action. What I would almost call orchestration leaders, not Yeah. we need functional foundations, yes, but we need people who are willing to take any and all options and any and all data to drive solutions, and they just continually drive solutions. And I think that's a big difference. Gotcha. No. That's fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing those perspectives, for for sure, Scott. So so with that said, as you're looking for this orchestration, right, this is a great segue into the next session of our conversation because orchestration is not simple. Orchestration is very complex because you're working across multiple silos of an organization. You're talking about how do you connect this data, where does this data come from, how do you create the workflows that work across, the entire horizontally across the entire organization? Those kind of things. Right? So we really appreciate the audience, providing their questions to us when we ask them for what workflows would they like to automate. But before I jump into it, I wanna talk a little bit about one of the biggest challenges that we have seen in the industry, and Shannon is gonna, expand a little bit on it. But let me share my screen first as I'm I'm I'm, talking to this. Please let me know, if if if you all can see my screen. Yes. Yes? Awesome. So, what what we found as as we, went through this journey even within the last, fifteen months twelve to fifteen months is that while FourKites was able to create these AI agents, and Shenna is gonna talk through what each of our agents go do for for the, enterprises and all that in a bit here. What we found is that this was all new to the enterprise, and it still is new to a lot of, the Fortune 500, executives. And what's new about it is, one, okay. What do we automate? What can the agent do versus what should our, employees do? The second thing is we have a standard operating procedure that our planners follow day to day, but how do we automate that? What is what is the new process look like? What should the new workflow look like? And those kind of questions took forever to answer. And once those were answered, it it took a while. It took another few weeks to months to get those workflows all figured out and answered. So our product team thought this through, based on those customer conversations and realized that, hey. What if there is an agentic library and an agent a conversational agent, like a developer agent like Sophie, where you can just chat with Sophie and say, hey, Sophie. I'd like to do one, two, three, four, five. These five steps as part of this workflow, can you build one for me? Right? What if you can make it so easy that you just put in the standard operating procedure of your own organization, and then Sophie can then turn it around and create workflows, agentic workflows that will work for you. Right? That's that's the kind of vision with which our leadership team and our product team have come up with this, Loft platform. I know Shannon's gonna talk a little bit more about the Loft, but as part of our demo today, we have asked all participants to provide or suggest their, ideas for, for automating from a workflow standpoint. And since due to time, we couldn't go through all of them, but you can see that, there were a lot of suggestions. Exception management and proactive alerts, track and trace for shipment visibility, that made up a majority of them, as you can see, around 37% of them, of the suggestions. But there were, some suggestions around carrier communication automation, compliance and document management, supplier and PO management, something that our, supplier connect, solution, and Sam and Tracy take care of that detention and rate management. So as you can see, there are a lot of suggestions that were made on this. And the good news is a majority of these workflows that were suggested are already part of our workflow library, are already part of our Loft agentic library. So this is very exciting for us, and we are looking forward to, sharing how this works. Shana, any any comments on, on, the the survey results here? No. None whatsoever. I think we can get started. Okay. Awesome. With that said, I'm gonna stop sharing. Shana, it's all yours. Okay. Thanks. So wanted to mention a few things. I we have worked with large retailers, and I'm gonna get in the platform. We work with a couple of large retailers, and, you know, where kind of LOFT came from is just what she was talking about. If you can imagine a company handing me an 85 page SOP for their inbound process, and and going through that. It takes hours to go through that and and look at the triggers and make recommendations. So that's kinda where we got into Loft. So I'm gonna share my screen now, and then we can walk through one of the recommended workflows. I did have some customers send me some workflows via email. I will say that the important thing, and I hope everybody can see my screen okay. Looks like you. can. We Yeah. Thank. you. We think the important thing is you guys sent me a couple of workflows directly, which was absolutely fine for you to be on the phone, but it was a print screen and it was not necessarily a workflow. And I should kinda show you when we go in to Loft, and this is the home everybody knows, Workspace, Visibility, Appointment Manager, all your tools here. Loft is now available here. But when I come into, I can see the agents, the workflows, and we'll go in here. We're going to create a new workflow. Once again, it's just using natural language query. I'm going to drop in what we received. I'm going to take that out. Sorry. Basically, this workflow, and this is one of our standard workflows. The new was highly actually asked for during the demo. This is a standard workflow for us. This is a workflow that I would say for Tracy, we have probably, when I'm talking to customers, about one to five workflows that I typically recommend. This workflow is a delivery, something trending late to delivery. And what happens is, you know, the Tracy will check every hour or whatever frequency, desired. This will be all configurable, and I'll show you, you know, that they'll go through, and an email will go out to the carrier, every two hours. Those can be single emails. They can be batched emails. They can be batched into an Excel spreadsheet, whatever you guys really want to see. And then we even, you know, can call people people, operations, and, we're even monitoring the workflow by adding tags. So what's happened now is I've basically put in the, late trending late to delivery workflow. Sophie's gone through and figured out the natural language query. She's identified what the triggers are and what's gonna happen through this workflow, and she's even identified what agents are gonna be selected for the workflow. She's picked Tracy. If it's not Tracy, she'll call that out. But, you know, it's a 100% that everything that I've asked for in this workflow flow can be done, and, we'll have to do a little bit of configuration, in this, but we'll continue and go in. There are some questions that I need it wants to ask me, wants to know kind of like CronJob, how often should it be looking for a late shipment with this scenario? Pretty easy for me to go in. I I want it to use a specific email, which we would make a custom email for a customer. It could either be your domain or or one of our domains. We have customers doing both, so that's pretty easy. But we're just gonna do, you know, the frequency here. Once we get to the frequency of the cron jobs, we'll go in and make some minor adjustments, to some of the workflows and that'll be it. We're gonna update an email here, couple email updates. So it's kind of that easy. So now I'm gonna actually generate the workflow and I'll continue to the workflow. It's gonna think here for a moment. It's pretty quick. It's really fast today. So it's telling me, hey. Here here's your workflow. So let's go in and look at the workflow that Sophie created in law for me. And, So, before you jump into the workflow, right, maybe if you could help the audience, understand what would their life have been before something like this. Meaning, in the manual world, could you if if you could shed some light no. Don't mean to interrupt you, but it'll help. I'm just trying to understand that aspect as well as we're going through that. Yep. And and we'll we'll I was gonna get to the we'll we'll show exactly what's happening, you know, in real life here in a moment when we get everything configured. But what we would do is basically, this workflow is reaching out to the carrier to advise if anything's late. Usually what customers are doing is they're waiting for their end customer to call their transportation department and say something's late. But in our platform, basically, this trigger is looking for anything that reaches a late or very late status, and I'll show you this in a moment in the platform. And then once that status hits on our platform, then that's when the agent starts working. So they're searching for a specific triggers. So we'll go in. I'm gonna make some minor adjustments to the workflows, but I just wanna show how quick and easy this is. So once again, looking for late and very late shipments. I'm just going to pull up all the stacks. We're going to eliminate a couple of stacks here. We're actually only going to be looking at truckload shipments, so I'll come in. But these are all fields you're probably familiar with in our platform. Going in and just really flipping these switches so that, that I can get the workflow to trigger. So once I edit the parameters, they'll all pop up on the right hand side, saying that I'm complete. Now we just do it need to do a little, configuration on on the emails and frequency of those. I can come in, it's going to give me an email description. This is based off the natural language query that was happening. When Sophie read the natural language query and looking through, I can come in and edit email subject lines. It's really easy to adjust everything that's happening in this workflow. For the sake of the workflow, if you guys aren't familiar, we actually have contact lists that can be added. But for this workflow today for the team, I'm actually gonna come in and just take off that primary, secondary, and tertiary, contact list, which that would flow through. You can have a primary contact, which is the carrier. If I wanted to escalate to a carrier manager, that would be level two. And if I wanted to escalate, you know, to anyone further, I could do all of those things. I can batch the emails. I can do a bunch of different things here, but we're just gonna get the email set. We're gonna get the email set so that we can run this. And then one more configuration, like I said, much easier. When I was going through workflows with customers, and, you know, and actual SOPs that are 75 pages long or 77 pages long, you know, that was a lot of work to look through. But Tracy's already looked through everything, told me exactly what I needed to do. We're gonna update the email here. We'll go in and show the actual demo. Scroll down a little bit. This is these are actually all the webhooks. So once again, all that back end work is done for everybody. These would be things that your IT team would be doing. This is all part of the tool. These are all the webhooks that Tracy is actually gonna hit for this actual workflow. All this work is already done, parsed out. Tracy's already figured out all, you know, all the API work, API webhooks she needs to hit, and then I'm gonna apply those changes. And really, it's it's that easy. So so now I'm I'm pretty much done. I've updated the parameters, for this workflow, and now we have a nice little test button. So if I wanna test this, see how everything works, it's gonna tell me everything that's going on, test, and we're gonna have this test execute. Now now we'll get into the fun part where you can see what the output is of of everything. But, you know, now now taking, like, days, hours, very long time for these to execute and pull these together. I just did that in a matter of a few moments. So now it's it's marked every every shipment that it believes, you know, will be, for test, and I'm going to I can see everything's testing now. So now I'm gonna go check my email and see if I got an email yet from Fresh. Oh, I have an email. So I have an email actually from Tracy that is, you know, telling me how the late deliveries. Once again, this is highly configurable, and this is going to a carrier. So now, basically, we would like to get an update and know why these shipments are late. The reason that's important is now we're going to get a new updated carrier ETA. Then the other thing is now I'm going to get late reason codes from the carrier, whether it's hours of service or traffic or anything happening there that I can use in my system for future discussions or detention, debates, back with the courier. I'm not gonna reply on every shipment, but I'm just gonna respond about one shipment, and we'll, tell Tracy that. Now, normally, I wouldn't have to do this, but I didn't wanna take up your time with configuring, the emo flow. So I'm just gonna have to delete this one little section here. Normally, I wouldn't do do that. That won't be part of that, but I didn't think you guys wanted to watch me configure that. So I'm gonna send this update back to Tracy. And now we'll go into the platform. So when I go into the platform, here are all the late shipments, that were triggered from the workflow. When I go into the platform, what I'm doing is I'm waiting to see, you know, the update from Tracy here. So once these updates let me refresh. Once these updates come through, we'll get a comment here and we'll get some updates on the carrier utility. So right now, once again, looking at the very late status of a shipment, then the very late status of the shipment, asking the carrier for information, and then there we go. And there we have the comment. So I have a comment that we have, successfully extracted the information, and then all of the carrier ETAs and everything will update automatically. And now, you know, I have all of this done. So usually, we'll get an AI tag here that says something's in progress or something's resolved, but this is all highly configurable, easy for me to go through in Loft and do exactly, you know, what I did now to make sure I get all the flags and API calls back and forth. So, Shari, there is the locked demo live. I can come back in and see that here are all the test shipments in progress, and then I can come in and say, you know, let me update this because it'll actually show that there was a successful hit and that we got an email back from the carrier. So we're keeping a usage usage log of everything that's happening on this AI workflow. Very impressive. Quite impressive. Okay. Very fast. Very fast. Most of the Tracy responses, depending on the complexity, if it's a worksheet they're work she's working on, and you can see we had it success. That was the email that I sent. Successful hit. But, usually, we have about a twenty eight second response time. With a maximum response time, I've seen, a four minutes, but that's a very complicated workflow cut maybe where a customer is sending in a spreadsheet and, you know, Tracy's parsing out that spreadsheet and sending it out to 50 different carriers, different things like that. But still a four minute time is pretty pretty impressive. Yes. Awesome. This is fantastic. Just for the sake of the broader audience, there is a q and a section in the chat for you to ask any questions you you may wanna ask here. If if you'd if you'd like to have more of a a private conversation, you can click on the speak to four kites button that's at the top right corner of your screen, and we can schedule some time with you to have, a more, private session or a or a company, specific session with with your team. With that said, we are looking forward to getting some questions. And as that's happening, Shanna, if that's okay, I have a few questions I'll just ask you and maybe we'll have this conversation. Right? So, tell me a little bit about this particular use case that workflow that you selected, right, which is the driver driver delay, workflow. Could you explain a world where Tracy does not exist? And how would a typical enterprise go through this process? Right? How would a user in a typical enterprise go through this process in that world? Yeah. Outside of Forekites or within. Forekites? Outside of okay. It's just if they're going to their manual process today, maybe using spreadsheets and emails and phone calls, how does that look? Yeah. I can tell you for some of our customers, they have transportation part departments of anywhere from three people to 36 people and even more. Right? So you have people, but usually what's happening I think the difference here is that Tracy, as soon as something is later very late, is already reaching out to the carrier. Usually, a a person that's in a transportation department isn't going to know that a shipment is late until somebody asked about the shipment. That's typically how it happens. So when when a, you know, shipper, you know, their customer calls in and says, hey, where is the shipment? That's when they start doing all the activities, calling the carrier, trying to get an update. So an update, you know, what we've heard in the industry is anywhere from, you know, ninety minutes for a transportation department, person to get an update or longer from a carrier. So if they're proactively all that information is already being done by Tracy, then someone go into the platform and see, you know, exactly what's happening. They can even sort and filter on things that, you know, are important to them to execute and move away from handling those emails. But, typically, they're not gonna know about something being late or very late until somebody reaches out and calls them. Yeah. It's funny you say that, Shanna, because I recently was in a customer conversation, and the number one thing that they said is we don't want our customers to call us after we fail. I would much rather proactively inform the customer that something's going to be delayed than react on something where a customer has told me already that we haven't delivered something. Right? So it's it's resonating really well with what what you're sharing here. Shanna, we have another question from, Suzanne Evans. She what she's asking is, when will we have the ability to try this out in the platform? Yeah. I think for right now, just because I I did go through the configuration really quick, and you saw I had to make a little adjustment there, where I took out something in the body of the email. Configuration is probably a little bit, you know, past what what our customers are able to do, but we are gonna get there. These workflows, like I said, are really easy to set up. There was one thing I didn't configure and just had to do a manual step. I think the future, our product and engineering team is going that direction where customers could activate, you know, our standard workflows. But right now, there would be a solution adviser, that would help you through that process and get everything. Now we would still use Loft, but we would help you through that process. Thank you so much, Shanna. That's super helpful. I I also have another question from, Najib Abdes Sadak. I'm sorry if I'm not saying that name right. When settings when setting these workflows, is Sophie assessing if the request makes sense or going or going into kind of a loop scenario, chicken and egg. Right? So trying to understand how is Sophie can kind of assessing the the credibility of that workflow. I I think it's great. I mean, I could actually I know we kind of ran out of time, but, what even though I showed you a scenario where it weighs, like, a 100% that everything was available, I I could put a workflow in there that, you know, maybe everything isn't connected. And what Sophie does is she'll actually read through the workflow and say, is development needed? Is there an outside connection that doesn't currently exist? And she will analyze all that and absolutely show you, you know, exactly what's happening and what needs to be developed where where it's the outside source. But even from, even from Loft, I could configure those outside parameters in. But it does highlight if there isn't a connection or if something doesn't make sense, and it will, prompt you to go back and and fix those things. Awesome. Thank you so much, Shanna. This is great. We we are having some really good questions. Feel free to come into the chat and ask more questions. We have one more question from Suzanne again. The question is, how does Sophie do with workflows that have not already been accomplished manually? Meaning the workflow doesn't exist today. It's a brand new workflow. How does Sophie manage that? I think that's a really good point because I think through this process, we have had customers come to us with SOPs as I as I've mentioned. And, even though I would even say they've come to workflows and been open to say, hey. You know, we haven't done this mainly. We haven't done it this way. We'll you know, we can parse out exactly what that workflow should look like. It doesn't matter if it's been accomplished manually or not or if, you know, we've had customers who are saying don't deviate from how it works today in our our our, you know, in our organization, and we can align to that. Or if they say, we want the workflow that makes sense, you know, let Sophie create that, then we can do that as well. So we kind of, you know, tackle it from all levels because some customers are like, we don't want any anything to change with the workflow. We want it to be the same, and other people wanna innovate and change and and and make maybe workflows a little bit more logical. So we we can handle all aspects of that. Hey, Shannon. Do you mind if I ask a question, Sri? You don't mind. Do you, mind? please. I don't. Well, let's just say I am I'm afraid of messing something up. Like, hey. I wanna do it, and I want, you know, Sophie to build this for me. But, you know, I think you have some certainly, you're very capable. But what if I'm not so capable? I mean, what are some of the safeguards that are in place that make sure I'm not gonna send, Walmart all the Kroger's delivery information, for example? Yeah. I mean, it takes you through everything step by step, just like like when I was kinda showing. Even though I went through it a little bit a little bit more quickly than I would have liked, it does prompt you for all that information. So I can actually you know, if I put in Walmart, you know, if it wants to be a customer and I wanna restrict it, you know, there won't be a little pop up and bubbles that happen along the way. Okay. Good. Good. Thank you. So so that's great. Meaning Sophie can understand your situation and then ask you the right questions to clearly define the boundaries and the parameters before we go down too too far down that path is what I'm hearing, Shanna. Is that correct? Yeah. So when you get into and I could pop a little workflow in and share it again. I could do one that's a little bit different, but I don't think we have time today. But, usually, what'll happen is it'll say in the workflow if there's something that needs to be done on that trigger, that action, whatever that step that's happening in the workflow, it'll actually call out and it'll say, you know, 97% or, you know, 15%. And then you'll have to go through and work through those items. So if it if it is a customer, you'll need to add their customer emails or you add the contacts and click click to those. So it kinda walks you through those steps. So it does make it a lot easier for the SAs now. Like I said, I worked on some SOPs that were pretty lengthy, and I would say they took me hours and days to actually, you know, work with product and engineering and get the workflow. So Loft has been just a lifesaver for us to go in and and drop workflows into. Awesome. That's fantastic. Shannon, I'm gonna ask a less technical question, more of a a business question. I know earlier Scott mentioned that he would advise supply chain officers chief chief supply chain officers to look at QuickWins. You mentioned that, hey. QuickWins is important. Maybe if you could shed some light and share how can Loft or how is Loft a true game changer for enterprises when it comes to those quick wins. Right? Because if quick wins are what gets AI credibility in an enterprise, if you could shed some light there, that'd be fantastic. Yeah. I mean, I would say that, you know, usually when we're working with customers and we're we've been working on large, you know, intelligent control tower, solutions. And when you're looking at the entire, supply chain, you know, usually we ask customers, what is your what is the one problem you wanna focus on or you wanna solve? And then we go out from there. I mean, a quick win can be working on transportation. A lot of people will start with the Tracy workflows because there are five standard workflows, letting make sure an asset gets assigned, letting me know if something picks up late because it will probably translate to a late delivery, letting me know what's happening along the way. You guys saw a late delivery workflow, which is very common. I wanna know when something's late, and now I wanna know why it's late. You know, what is the real ETA so I can communicate as the customers. Tracy is kinda the foundation and building block. You know, we have customers like, that Coca Cola. They have implemented Cassie knowing that everything's tracking right. If a customer calls in and asks for an update on an order, you know, we know that Tracy already has all the information and Cassie can pull that information along, you know, Sam on inbound. Sam has been doing great. Sam AI has been doing a great job for customers. Well, that's where there's a lot of manual processes, a lot of documents that people are sending back and forth in email and getting everything, you know, into a digital framework and having everything controlled has been a lifesaver for many customers and an easy, you know, access in the portal to go to a shipment and find documentation or see what's happening on a shipment because Sam's created it or attached documents or done, you know, things for the customers that were taking them long time to process all this information, and the agents are doing it in a manner matter of seconds. Awesome. Fantastic. So what used to take, say, weeks to identify the SOPs, read the SOPs manually, understand the SOPs, create the agentic workflows. Once those agentic workflows are created, test them, make sure that all the parameters are right, and then deploy them can now happen in a matter of a few days is is what I'm hearing, Shanna. Is that is that correct in in terms of, what I'm hearing? Yes. Yes. Oh, that's fantastic. I know we only have four minutes. Just wanna quickly remind the audience that if you have any additional questions or if you'd like to schedule a call with our forecast representative, feel please feel free to, click on the speak to forecast button. But quickly, Shanna, as before we end the call, you know, you talked about Cassie in terms of how Cassie can respond to customer inquiries. We talked about Sam, how Sam can, focus on suppliers and supplier collaboration piece of it. Could you shed some light on the other agents as well? I think Alan, Polly, if you could maybe help us understand a little bit about what those agents do as well. Yep. Alan's focused on appointment management. We've implemented, Alan where we kind of had him focused on outbound. So when you're making appointments with your customers and the deliveries at Walmart, going into portals, taking emails, phone calls, Alan's focused on that. But we've also implemented Alan across the board for appointment manager. Where we're seeing Allen become really helpful for customers is on inbound supplier shipments and making appointments either an appointment manager, you know, our one of our tools automatically for customers, taking spreadsheets, and and eliminating emails back and forth between, you know, supply planning and, suppliers and automating, you know, information and even scheduling for just in time factories. So Alan can even schedule by PO line what's coming in, what truckload needs it to be there, and the spacing between those PO lines as they arrive into your factories because a lot of just the time can't have a PO line, arrive after, you know, PO line, you know, PO line one, two, they all need to be in order. Didi, she focuses on detention and demurrage. What I mean by that, detention fees coming in. She also does a little bit of international, but if you're getting detention fees coming in, we already have all that information in the platform. If Tracy's tracking everything and she's getting late reason codes, as she should, then Didi can go look at a shipment end to end and see, you know, should you be paying detention on that? We see a lot of carriers. If you have a minimum, they'll send you the minimum for $249, and you know you're gonna. pay it. I see Scott shaking his head, but Yes. Correct. I think we're all familiar, but Didi can Didi can look at that and say, no. That's not an actual charge you should pay, so on. But and and then, we also have Poly that handles document management, going out and getting PODs for customers. We're seeing in industry, customers are not, you know, paying carrier invoices or, you know, invoicing their customer until they have a POD. So all the agents can help with that, but happy to take a deeper dive and and get into your use cases because every customer has a different use case. Awesome. This is fantastic, Shannon. Thank you so much for walking us through, the loft demo. Thanks for answering all the questions patiently. Suzanne, Najeeb, thank you so much for asking the questions. And and and, Scott, any closing thoughts before we end this webinar? Yeah. I just you got we're you're giving the gift of time. Right? So if I save time, I can do more strategic things, and it's a great gift, Shannon and Shree. So thank you for giving it. Thanks, Awesome. Scott. Thank you so much. Thanks, Scott, for your time. Thanks, Shanna. Thank you so much, audience, for joining us on this webinar, and we are looking forward to future conversations with you. Thank you.