Intro & Outro: 0:00

Welcome to the Tennessee on Supply Chain Management podcast. Listen in as co-hosts Ted Stank and Tom Goldsby set sail into the world of end-to-end supply chain management, diving deep into today's most relevant business topics. They'll share insights in pressing industry issues and tackle the challenges keeping supply chain professionals up at night. If you're enjoying the ride, download and subscribe to Tennessee on Supply Chain Management on your favorite podcast platform now.

Ted Stank: 0:28

Hello everyone and welcome to Tennessee on Supply Chain Management. This is our sixth episode of season three. A lot of crazy stuff going on. As we sit here recording, it's early March 2025, six weeks into the new Trump 2.0 administration, and if anybody is not on the far side of the moon, you'll know that there is just a lot of change going on. Much of that change is impacting the supply chain. We'll touch on some of that today and then we'll talk about how do we stay flexible? What are tools we can use to try to help us? In this time, we'll bring on our guest, jason Murray, to talk about AI applications. In this time, we'll bring on our guest, jason Murray, to talk about AI applications in supply chain. Before we get into that, let's introduce my co-host, great friend, tom Goldsby.

Tom Goldsby: 1:12

Hello, ted, great to be back with you. Our loyal listeners may have realized that I was missing on the last episode, but fortunately we had Josh King, the Director of Marketing and Operations for the Global Supply Chain Institute here at UT, do such a great job on the last podcast. That said, I'm glad to be back in the mix, but hey, we've got a real full room today, so let's get around to introducing some of the other folks.

Ted Stank: 1:39

Good deal. One of the other people joining us as co-host is our own Thomas Deakins. Thomas is Managing Director of our own Thomas Deakins Thomas is managing director of our Global Supply Chain Institute. He's also a UT supply chain management undergrad and MBA former vice president of Project 44, and also worked with companies like Oracle, G-Log, Trimble, Mavenwire, MercuryGate, CHEP, SLI Consulting and JB Hunt, so pretty much covered the spectrum of supply chain companies, Thomas, welcome.

Thomas Deakins: 2:08

Hey, happy to be here and honored to be part of the show, so looking forward to it.

Ted Stank: 2:14

Great Also like to welcome our guest, Jason Murray. Jason is co-founder and CEO at Shippium after a 19-year career and ended up as a vice president with Amazon. Jason's been with us as a partner on Global Supply Chain Institute for a while now. He spoke to our executive advisory board last year and just blew us all away with what he's doing at Chipium and the promise of AI in helping us in uncertain times. Again, as I hedged that early, if you don't think that we're living in uncertain times, then you probably have been on the far side of the moon, Jason, welcome.

Jason Murray: 2:49

Hey, great to be here. Nice to see you guys, I'm excited.

Ted Stank: 2:51

Hey, I mentioned a little while ago that we had our executive advisory board. We recorded our podcast from that executive advisory board last month. A lot of great discussion. One of the big topics was how do we apply AI in the supply chain? I think it's one of those issues that we all know it's coming. Everybody is trying it in different ways. I'm not sure yet that there are some great use cases, although hopefully Jason will be able to shed some light on that. We had about 30 of our advisory board members present, had some great presentations on some of the projects we're working on in the Advanced Supply Chain, collaborative around planning, around how do we improve retention of Gen Y and Gen Z labor, particularly manufacturing and operations. So a lot of really good stuff. It was great to have them all there. Thomas, we also have something big coming up in the second week in April. You want to talk a little bit about Forum.

Thomas Deakins: 3:44

Yeah, thanks, ted. April 8th through 10th we will have our Supply Chain Forum. It'll be the one for the spring. Downtown Knoxville Marriott again dates April 8th through the 10th. So if you haven't registered, please do so. Look forward to seeing everybody. We've got a great lineup of content. Two of the guest speakers I'll highlight real quick. One will be Marianne Wanamaker, who's the Dean of the Baker School for Policy and former economist at the White House in the Trump 1.0. And she will give us a state of the economy, so we're so excited to hear about that. And then the second one is the new voice of the Vols, mike Keith. Mike used to be the voice of the Titans. It'll be great to hear from him and also just the ties that he has back to our department.

Ted Stank: 4:33

I think Mike came over to Tennessee because the Vols are looking a lot better than the Titans these days. That's not hard. The Titans used to play football, but I'm not sure anymore. This is said as a person who is a New York Giants and Tennessee Titans fan, so these are bad times for me in pro football. Hey, tom, you have been traveling the country, if not the globe, going to various conferences with your ear on the ground. What?

Tom Goldsby: 5:01

are some of the things you're hearing about in supply chain these days. Thanks, ted, and that's why I missed the ad board, which, by the way, I heard that was the best ad board ever by some estimation. So I was really sorry to miss that. But yeah, I've been out and about. Just got in late last night, found myself earlier this week in Cameron Indoor Stadium of all places at Duke University, some place I didn't know if I'd ever be, but that's neither here nor there. I've been out in some industry meetings in the defense sector, retail, also a National Science Foundation meeting on circular economy last week at Vanderbilt, also a logistics doctoral symposium at Auburn. Those have all been in the last two, two and a half weeks. A lot of traveling. It's really interesting. I think back to the travels I had very early in the year.

Tom Goldsby: 5:45

Supply Chain Leaders in Action convened in the second week of January and I think there were very bullish expectations, a lot of optimism and expectations of growth.

Tom Goldsby: 5:55

And wait, wait can you hear that the air seeping out of the balloon Not so bullish right now. A lot of uncertainty, even some suggestions of the R word recession floating out there. Consumer sentiments are down and I'm kind of picking up on some of that in the last week or so. I know we're going to be talking a little bit about tariffs, but floating these tariffs, implementing them one day and pulling them back the next and then threatening to reintroduce them a month later, doesn't really instill confidence and people willing to pull the trigger and invest. And so this kind of carrots and stick approach well, it's all stick, it seems, frankly is kind of stressing us all out and squeezing a lot of the enthusiasm, confidence and exuberance that we saw earlier in the year. It's just amazing how quickly things have turned and frankly, as in the defense sector, would you think that would be one budget that might not get touched by Elon and Doge, and now we're seeing cuts there are being proposed anyway.

Ted Stank: 6:58

Thomas mentioned Marianne Wanamaker, who's going to be a keynote speaker at the forum in April. She also came and joined us at the advisory board and she's got a lot of inside perspective, if you will, given her previous positions. She said one thing that the Trump administration is really always keeping their eye on is the stock market. You know, I think, that as of today, president Trump kind of gave a moratorium to tariffs on automotive industry and also just a little while ago announced that there was a one month moratorium on the 25 percent tariff on Mexico. So I think one thing I would caution everybody is not to jump into the realm of mass hysteria. I think what the stock market is is a one particular dimension of mass hysteria and everybody reacts and you don't kind of want to be running with the crowd. So I think my recommendation on a lot of this there's a lot of question about whether we're going to invest. Jobs reports comes out tomorrow and there's a question as to whether it's going to show that we added 30,000 jobs or 300,000 jobs.

Ted Stank: 7:59

Most of the federal layoffs will not shown up yet in this jobs report, so my recommendation is steady as she goes let's not get into mass hysteria.

Tom Goldsby: 8:09

Yeah, I haven't cashed out the 401k, even though there's been some suggestion of it. But you know, just in terms of investing I do agree no need to run toward a ledge or anything like that but just in terms of the bullish outlook of just a few months ago, again, I think we'll agree that floating tariffs, pulling them back and then threatening to introduce them time and again Again, it's an easy thing to say. Whether they actually collected a dollar of tariffs is yet to be seen, because they actually hadn't implemented them. It takes a little time to actually implement policies. I hear what you're saying, but again reporting on the word on the street. For instance, I was supposed to go to Oklahoma City next week for another military meeting. Dod meeting canceled because military personnel are not permitted to travel, and that's true of a lot of federal folks. They weren't at the NSF meeting last week in Nashville, so there's already starting to be some ramifications, I guess.

Ted Stank: 9:04

Sure, I totally agree, and I mean there's just uncertainty across the board whether it's related in the supply chain world. Probably the thing that impacts us the most is what is happening with tariffs. I certainly wouldn't want to be in the automotive industry when you think about how linked we are to Canada and Mexico, but again, I heard a great comment from somebody who was interviewed at the TPM conference that recently convened in San Diego, and they said if you want to start putting contingency plans in place based on what happened today, you'd be an absolute fool, because that may totally change tomorrow. You know, we said it during COVID Seems like we say it during every crisis.

Ted Stank: 9:41

Resilience is the word of the day for supply chain managers, and with this focus on resilience, we have tools available to us today that we haven't had in the past that I think can help us, and so, with that, we've asked Jason to join us to talk about what I conceive as the cutting edge of AI applications in supply chain. So, jason, welcome aboard Any initial comments you want to make about what we've just been talking about?

Jason Murray: 10:05

Well, great to be here. Seriously, yeah, I mean, I think, largely speaking, supply chains. You either kind of get good at predicting stuff, or if there's a lot of uncertainty, you have to be able to react fast, and I think that's what we're seeing. It's just how do you kind of adjust to that. I do tend to believe with you. I'm kind of in the camp of. I think Trump thinks that the stock market is very important, and so it makes me very skeptical of how far he's willing to go, kind of from an economy perspective, regardless of what your political bent is. So that's my take on it. I'm not ready to throw the year in the garbage yet. I think there's a lot that needs to play out first before we can make any definitive conclusion on where things are going.

Ted Stank: 10:45

So I can't sell you my gold or my crypto? No, yeah.

Jason Murray: 10:49

Yeah, I mean being at the forefront of technology. I still don't totally understand the crypto thing.

Ted Stank: 10:57

I'm glad to hear you say that.

Jason Murray: 10:59

I really have tried. You know, the Bitcoin stuff is actually super interesting the origination of that but the coin stuff is still just wild to me. I don't understand it.

Thomas Deakins: 11:08

You don't have a bunch of meme coins, jason, come on.

Jason Murray: 11:11

I don't. Clearly I'm missing out, but I don't, as it turns out.

Ted Stank: 11:15

So I'm glad to hear you say that, because I thought I had entered the realm of remember. When you went to your grandparents' house, when we had VCRs and the clock was flashing 12 because they didn't have a set, I thought that I was getting to that point.

Jason Murray: 11:27

Well, maybe, but I'm there with you if that's the case.

Thomas Deakins: 11:31

Love it. Let me chime in on one thing real quick, because I saw this this morning and I think this is probably where we are with the tariffs. Brown Foreman was more worried about the fact that Canada was going to pull Jack Daniels off the shelf than they were about a tariff. That would hurt them more than it would if a tariff got implemented and I was just like, okay, there, we are right there. Yeah that's an absolute right. It's the whiskey and the bourbon Canadians are going to revolt yeah.

Ted Stank: 11:56

Thomas, you've known Jason for a long time. You want to jump in and start asking some good questions of Jason.

Thomas Deakins: 12:01

Yeah, let me just do real quick intro of Jason for our listeners. Jason's co-founder and CEO of Shipium, where he guides the company's vision towards becoming the world's best supply chain technology platform for e-commerce and retail. Prior to founding Shipium, jason spent 19 years at Amazon as VP of Retail Systems and VP of Forecasting and Supply Chain. While there, he owned the global software and operations group that powered Amazon Prime, subscribe and save and pricing. He's a University of Washington grad and an engineer at heart, who loves solving complex, scaling problems.

Jason Murray: 12:35

That about sums it up. The high level story with Shippium is I spent the 20 years at Amazon 19 years and the whole notion of using technology to solve these types of problems has kind of become my career, and Shippium is an extension of that. You know I love talking about everything related to the space, data science and now AI, and you know before that maybe ML. This whole trend I think is very, very applicable to supply chain, because the supply chain is all about prediction and flexibility, Right, so it just fits in perfectly, and so all of these discussions are kind of more about this larger trend of what I see, what I've been watching happening. I was lucky enough to watch it happen at Amazon, but I'm watching it continue after that. I think, to some degree, we're really in a great time to be in this space, because I think the technology is going to be transformative and it just kind of keeps getting better and more applicable.

Thomas Deakins: 13:28

What made you, you, or what was that trigger or the catalyst that said, hey, I'm going to go co-found this company called Shippium. I guess what were the pain points that you were seeing in the industry?

Jason Murray: 13:37

You know, part of it is, I think, when I got out of school I wanted to. You know, I've always had kind of an interest in doing something entrepreneurial and I worked at a startup maybe a year or two right out of school before Amazon and then got recruited in Amazon. At that point it was close to a startup. It was very, very rough in those early days in terms of what it was and how big it was and kind of where we fit in with everything. Then it obviously just kind of blew up over the next several years and you get caught up in that and to some degree, me leaving Amazon was largely about this notion of I just kind of wanted to get back to building, where you have a much larger impact on the business, et cetera. And when I left Amazon I wasn't a hundred percent sure what I wanted to do next.

Jason Murray: 14:16

I had a couple ideas but ultimately when I started I did some consulting type gigs and when I looked around the industry, I think what you saw was just that Amazon had built this tool set, this technology stack that was so powerful and useful if you're trying to run a supply chain and the way they thought about stuff. This was like a 20-year journey, right. Kind of the approach, with the use of data being a big point, some of the other points being the coordination between these stages and kind of more of a unified approach, et cetera was just so powerful. And then you kind of went and looked at other retailers that's who I was mostly talking to at the time through my contacts, and it was just, you know, the comparison was like I always kind of use the planet of the apes analogy, where you know Amazon's got these rocket ships and then you've got on the ground people are fighting with sticks and stones, right.

Jason Murray: 15:04

And so the concept behind Chipium really just started, a form of if we can use some sort of democratization type methodology where we're pulling together from several folks and combining technology, combining data, we could build something that kind of makes these retailers competitive. Since then it's expanded a bit, had a lot of traction with 3PLs, for example, and we're now kind of getting deeper into the B2B space, which to some degree I always kind of refer to as my opinion, going through a little bit of an Amazonification of that area. Supply chains are getting more complicated and they need to adjust to that also, but that's the high level story. That's how I kind of got here.

Thomas Deakins: 15:41

Ted, you might know somebody that used to work at Amazon too, right?

Ted Stank: 15:44

Yeah, jason, you know one of our close friends is Dave Clark. He's been a guest on this podcast before and, interestingly, Dave is starting to make some waves in a similar space with his new startup called Augur, where he's trying to really create a platform that pulls together. I've been doing this 35 years and I've been talking about this for 35 years and maybe we're going to see reality with what Dave's doing and with what you're doing, which is the ability to pull together data from across the supply chain so that we really can I like what you said democratize things and be able to create economies of scale, if you will, across different shippers, just because of being able to have that data availability.

Jason Murray: 16:23

I think we need as many eyes on the space as possible. I worked for Dave for a couple years back in probably 2015 or something that'd be my guess but I think the idea makes a ton of sense, especially with the technology the latest iterations of AI being really good at processing and transforming data in such a way that you could speed this process up. It sounds like they're still kind of trying to figure out exactly what it looks like, but the concept, like the North Star, makes a lot of sense to me.

Thomas Deakins: 16:52

Speaking of lots of data and being able to use artificial intelligence in that setting. I did some research and found out that in 2024, jason correct me if I'm wrong the Shippium platform you guys made over a billion that's a billion with a B predictions in the platform. You guys made over a billion that's a billion with a B predictions in the platform, and I know that's across numerous industries like retail, automotive, healthcare and, as you said earlier, a lot of your clients are in the 3PL sector, or we'd call it the LSB sector, but talk a little bit about that, because what's that mean from when I use the word prediction? So, for our listeners, talk a little bit about the shipping platform. What are you doing for your customers? What's the main problem you're trying to solve?

Jason Murray: 17:36

If I kind of like back out a little bit and just talk about the approach. I think the approach is not new per se, right, this is just coming directly from kind of the Amazon playbook. The idea here is you keep finding new ways to get as much data as possible and then you use that data to help make decisions down through this whole pipeline At a high level. That's simply kind of what we're doing and we've had the most luck with the company's been through iterations, as you do in early stage companies, and we thought that the way into people was going to be kind of more on the customer experience side. What we found when we got on the ground was there's so many to be kind of more on the customer experience side. What we found when we got on the ground was there's so many problems in kind of just the basic shipping optimization piece that that's really where they wanted to help, and so that's where we've had kind of our biggest success right, and so we help with a lot of decisions around things like transportation, lane optimization, where to ship from, trying to hit target dates with your shipping methods. As this data has expanded in our platform, we're now kind of predicting transit times of all these carriers and methods. So we can do a really fine grained job of either telling the customer this is when you should expect it or knowing that if I use this given method or lane, it's going to hit within this timeframe. And then the other part that's been really interesting is just kind of you take all that data that you've acquired and then allow people to run scenarios with it, right, and then have the tooling to do that, and we call that product on our side simulation. But the point just to kind of back it up right again, the magic happens with cloud technology enabled and then storage getting cheaper and now the massive spend and expansion of processing units for working through these data in more predictive ways has enabled is you can just start pulling more and more data into these platforms and then use that to make better decisions.

Jason Murray: 19:23

I kind of emphasize that in a simple way. I think that is something that this industry just has not been able to get started on. It sounds like painfully simple and it's kind of the standard playbook within the tech industry. But there's something about the fact that if you kind of came up through even the tech platforms that grew up in the 80s and 90s and they've just had trouble converting to that method of thought. They're all trying To some degree. I think of it as almost this DNA thing, where you have to kind of build the platform with that in mind from the start and then you get better outcomes. And that's why I think it's kind of exciting to see this new crop of technology platforms in this space and kind of seeing what the approach is right, whether that be Flexport, which is kind of doing a more of a tech-enabled model to us, which we are just like laser, focused on just the tech and data and optimization.

Ted Stank: 20:14

So, jason, when you came and spoke to the advisory board, you did a talk about how do you wade into this wild west world of technology and specifically generative AI, agentive AI. Can you give us a thumbnail sketch of your perspective on that, how you all are using it and if somebody is out there listening and saying, yeah, we know that we need to get going on it, maybe some advice on how to jump in and move with it?

Jason Murray: 20:37

Yeah, I think a big part of it is like cultural. I mean that in the sense that this is kind of part of the issue. Chances are, whatever state you're in now, things are going to get a little worse before they get better as you go into this. So that takes a certain level of kind of boldness as a leader to say like we're going to commit to solving this problem and actually put resources to it. It's explored in things like Innovator's Dilemma and there's multiple business books on this topic. But I think if you have this approach, if your culture of your company is built around I'm going to make decisions on gut feeling and history and kind of what we've done in the past and it's worked, et cetera, you're going to kind of get that as an outcome.

Jason Murray: 21:15

One of the more powerful aspects of Amazon was the willingness to kind of actually follow the data. It's never perfect. Humans have biases and this isn't easy and it takes really smart people to determine when something is correlated versus causal, et cetera, et cetera. You can go on and on. But if there's a commitment culturally from the company to kind of lean into, we want to move towards automation, optimization, use of data to make decisions, you will start to see a shift. That's kind of number one. And then I think you have these kind of tactical follow-ups, which are interesting, around investing in storage of data and capturing of data, working with data forward vendors, you know, that's kind of how we fit in. But all of that kind of anchors back to this first piece that you've got to start with a commitment. You have to believe this is the way to move the company forward.

Ted Stank: 22:02

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my experience is that once you start wading in and getting kind of up to your waist, your only limit is your team's innovativeness and willingness to try certain things. You know the whole cliche of fail fast, yeah, but you know just to say, hey, can we use this for this and to speed this up and to make us more accurate. Is that kind of a right way to look at it?

Jason Murray: 22:27

Absolutely. It starts building on itself, right. You capture one piece of data and that leads to another. That leads to how you're making decisions here and this is going to help with these decisions here, and it builds on itself, right, and that's that's kind of why I talk about culture and and I think that's the only way to do it you can definitely overcook it on the planning side. People just tend to overthink. It's not like technologists are immune to this. I think two years ago, when chat GPT blew up, there was 500 predictions of where it was going to go, and most of those haven't actually happened. It's gone all sorts of other directions, right? I think it's very hard to predict. You have to kind of be active and trying to play with it, but you wait in, even if the thing you're doing isn't working. Specifically, you're now learning how to operate in this environment. Which is going to capture the next thing that comes online, et cetera.

Tom Goldsby: 23:16

Hey Jason, I'm going to be serving on a panel at the ProMat in Chicago in about 10 days, looking forward to that, alongside John Paxson, the CEO of MHI, and they gave me an advanced copy of the annual report that MHI generates each year and they said Gen AI is great. We need to figure out how to leverage it. But the next wave is agentic AI. Can you help set the table a little bit, maybe prepare me for this panel so I can sound intelligent for that session?

Jason Murray: 23:44

coming up, I think, of agentic AI. It's a bit of a fuzzy definition, so I'll just give you how I kind of think about it. If you were to replace some job in your company with an AI bot or an AI agent. That's how I kind of think about agentic, right, it's a little disingenuous in the sense that maybe an example would be a customer service rep who can respond to things. Another example would be someone who's kind of constantly going out and testing the system autonomously. Another one would be someone who's kind of constantly going out and testing the system autonomously. Another one would be like extracting data from. You know, I'm going to go to these bunch of carriers' websites and try to extract data that might be useful in decisioning. Or imagine like a person used to have to do that manually and this thing is just going and kind of summarizing and pulling it together and bringing it into the fray, right. Those are examples of agentic AI.

Jason Murray: 24:30

I think the concept of autonomous demons or things running in software that went out and did stuff that's obviously been around. I think what makes it unique is kind of the notion that they're able to kind of self-adjust a little bit more than they have in the past. That's what makes it interesting If I'm getting customer service requests from someone, I'm actually going to adjust, you know, try to process through and make kind of adjustments to how I'm responding in a more autonomous way than like we have been able to in the past. And that's a function of just the power of these models that are coming online and the ability to kind of reason through some of that stuff.

Ted Stank: 25:04

Hey, Tom, just to be clear, you're going to be on a panel with John Paxton, CEO of MHI, right? Not John Paxson, former teammate of Michael Jordan on the Bulls, who used to swish those threes all the time.

Tom Goldsby: 25:18

That's helpful. You know, I think just getting my pronunciation of agentic AI is going to be a starting point for me, but that's a great explanation. And do you see those capabilities making their way into Shippium and what you have to offer?

Jason Murray: 25:31

You know, I would say this new wave of AI is largely about automation. There's so much pressure around replacing jobs and there's so much energy around that right, and a lot of it's able to automate these basic tasks that people had to do before. If I go back to my original comment on just the whole thing is we're just trying to pull in as much data as possible. The challenge you have in supply chain currently is, you know, there's like several tens of thousands of carriers in the United States alone and some massive number past that and on the world right, and so they all don't have EDI or API access to them. The thought of can I go out and extract data from these and pull that into this decisioning process, that's been super interesting. You know. Obviously this was maybe more on the straddling the line between what you'd call generative and agentic, but the coding stuff is pretty incredible, right. I mean that's been both from the standpoint of our developer productivity, how much we're able to get done with a given developer. On top of that, the thinking about part of the challenge you have is just integrating.

Jason Murray: 26:33

When I started Chipium, I thought we build a product and then people use it right. Well, if you're really in the space. A huge part of the problem is integrating with people, and so we've had a lot of luck with being able to simplify that process, and at least the AI is able to help do this initial mapping, which speeds up this process. So I think the more this stuff comes, you're just going to see more and more use cases as it continues to develop and kind of build out. You know we have a very kind of open approach to it, like I will try anything. Sometimes it doesn't work, and then you just perhaps wait a little while until you hear something else. But we try to be very open to everything, and I think there's a lot of use cases are appearing as we keep digging into this.

Thomas Deakins: 27:14

Good deal. Let me ask you one more question here real quick. Look into your crystal ball, jason, and I want you to tell me, like where is the Shippium roadmap, based on what you're hearing from the industry and talking to your customers and I know you're heavily involved on the prospect side and sales cycles too. But what's the next evolution of?

Jason Murray: 27:33

Shippium, we've done a really good job on kind of what I would call the shipping optimization space. It centers around understanding that I think we're planning on pushing in both directions right. We just kind of launched our initial billing management product for 3PLs, where now we're getting into kind of more some of the invoicing side and how they mark stuff up, and this is actually another example of a great use of Gentic AI, in the sense that we can potentially have something that is looking for anomalies and speed up that invoicing process in a much more automated way than it's done in the past. You go the other direction, I think. You kind of head more towards the customer experience side, and this goes back to like where we started. The idea is is that we continue to push up into delivery promise and driving growth through the platform, as opposed to being purely about cost optimization.

Jason Murray: 28:23

And then I think the third thing I kind of mentioned, we've gotten into simulation and have these large systems that can just use the same execution engine to process virtual transactions to come up with, potentially. What does this lead to from a planning perspective? And so we see ourselves as pushing on all fronts. In a lot of cases it will mean partnering with people and perhaps like, if they're good at some aspect of it, we're able to kind of take maybe the transportation piece and push that into their world also. But all systems go in terms of. There just seems to be a lot of runway in all directions.

Tom Goldsby: 29:03

That's awesome. You know, and Ted, this had to cross your mind as Jason was describing the value proposition of applying AI to complex transportation problems. Remember that paper we wrote way back in the year 2000, 25 years ago, yeah, and it was just a concept of all the cool things we were hoping to do. Is the future now? Are we living in that time?

Ted Stank: 29:26

You know, I think like everything, tom, it's evolving. Ten years from now there'll probably be other technology that can come to play, but you know, the concepts of supply chain management haven't changed tremendously. You know, in a couple of millennium probably, but the technology we apply to make it more efficient, more effective, certainly has and will continue to. So I think one of the really cool things that I've seen in my career is the number of people with Jason's kind of background, this solid computer engineering background, coming into the supply chain world. Like I'll have students come up to me and say I'm a supply chain major but I'm thinking about doing business analytics as a minor. Do you think that's a good thing? I'm like, dude, you want to get a good six figure opening salary coming out of the undergrad program and, yeah, do that. That's a really good thing.

Ted Stank: 30:14

Not to pick on my marketing colleagues, but so many of our students for a long time were supply chain majors, marketing minors, and I always tell them well, you have a good career if you want to go into sales with a 3PL, but if you really want to roll up your sleeves and get involved with where the world is going, it's really with the data side, the other thing I'd like to highlight. Jason, you mentioned culture. So you're not just pure engineering anymore. You've learned right. I have my roots in engineering, my roots in operations, and you know, I used to just think culture was this bogus stuff that psychologists talked about. But man, culture is everything 100%.

Jason Murray: 30:49

As Drucker said, culture eats strategy. Right, a lot, you know, and we're a long ways away from people not being involved. You need the motivation and the push and all the other stuff, and that's a critical part of an organization is anything. You can have all the technology you want, but if it's not being used or embraced in the right way, it won't go anywhere. You see that over and over.

Ted Stank: 31:10

That's why it's all about leadership, right.

Jason Murray: 31:12

Yeah, exactly.

Tom Goldsby: 31:14

Well, I think we got to wrap up about now. But hey, Jason, thank you so much. We Well, I think we got to wrap up about now, but hey, Jason, thank you so much. We've been. You know this has been a date that's been circled on our calendar for some time and things are changing so rapidly. So thank you very much for sorting things out for us and giving a sense for where we are, the potential of AI and also where it's heading.

Tom Goldsby: 31:31

And hey, Thomas, thank you very much for joining us. As well as a co-host, you were instrumental in bringing Jason into our fold. All as a co-host, you were instrumental in bringing Jason into our fold, so we really appreciate you for that and again, elevating our level of play, just as our team around GSCI does each and every day. And hey, just to give a little bit of a teaser of what's in store, the next supply chain forum is coming up in early April and, Ted, I think we've got a special guest. Colin Yankee, the Chief Supply Chain Officer of Tractor Supply, is going to be our special guest on the next podcast. Right?

Ted Stank: 32:03

Absolutely. We'll be doing our next podcast live from the forum on April 9th, I think. Is that right, Thomas? I think so. April 9th with Colin Yankee from Tractor Supply.

Tom Goldsby: 32:13

Another great partner of ours, Jason.

Ted Stank: 32:14

I echo my thanks to you and to Thomas. Great to have you guys with us. Wish we were all together because I would go out and buy a round for us all.

Jason Murray: 32:23

Oh it sounds good.

Ted Stank: 32:24

Maybe you can do it and put in a request on Venmo for me to pay you for it.

Tom Goldsby: 32:29

Yes. No pappy though no pappy Top shelf, jason, you earned it, man, all right everybody.

Ted Stank: 32:35

Thanks, as always. If anybody has any questions, suggestions, you can reach us at gsciutkedu Until next time be well.

Intro & Outro: 32:44

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