In a recent interview on CNBC, Garry Tan (CEO of Y Combination) mentioned that over 80% of startup founders currently enrolled in YC's accelerator program are working on AI products.
As the lengendary funding accelerator celebrates its 20th anniversary, LLM's are getting better by the minute & every industry is scrambling to understand which model fits best their use-case. "Agent" is a term that is used a lot in the tech community as automation frameworks are being rapidly deployed & embedded in business systems.
In this article i will dive into the logistics world to discuss how a company called HappyRobot is revolutionizing the trucking sector with AI voice agents.
A YC Combinator backed startup with investments from vc's like a16z, HappyRobot was founded by three engineers; Pablo & Javier Palafox (two brothers) and Luis Paarup.
When Javi worked for Deoleo, a multinational olive oil company, he saw a lot of shipping processes that weren't cost & time effective, especially when it came to connecting with someone in operations or a third party - either by phone or via email. As someone who works in the logistics industry myself, i constantly witness a lot of miscommunication in 3PL, outdated SOP's, coordination flaws & operational procedures that short-circuit the supply chain and cause massive inefficiencies in sectors like transportation.
Truckers are often juggling several tasks simultaneously like monitoring traffic, shifting gears, looking at their gps' & communicating with dispatch. In fact a lot of accidents involving cmv's have some relation to cell phone usage.
Due to the nature of transferring products/goods between businesses, trade is a machine that never sleeps & involves tons of manually repetitive correspondence.
Some conversations in logistics are tied to confirmations that are redundant, they can be automated to save labor time. In cases like real-time updates, customized delivery details, weather & ETA changes - those phone calls are very time consuming and distract businesses from mitigation planning & focusing on their next contract securement.
However the agents can also do more complex task like filtering compliance docs, negotiating a rate for a load & even booking.
Predictive analytics have been gradually adopted by the industry over the years as tools like the TMS dashboard became a standard.
That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement, for scaling businesses & eliminating human error prone repetitive tasks in the supply chain world, HappyRobot is at the forefront in integrating machine learning & finding automation driven solutions.