Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen predicts that freight logistics will see a lot more AI usage, from ocean freight contract writing to other parts of the supply chain that currently involve manual input.
“In five years we will be talking about what AI has done, which is take stuff we thought wasn’t going to be automatable, that’s taken us 10 years to wrangle data to structured ways that we can write scripts and algorithms to process and take some action against, and it’s turned out to be really, really hard to where all of a sudden AI can just do it,” Petersen said.
He was the keynote speaker on Day Two of FreightWaves’ Future of Supply Chain event in Atlanta. He was joined on stage Wednesday by FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller in a discussion titled “Challenges and opportunities of integrating ocean and highway services.”
“We see this with our ocean freight contract ingestion, which is a giant XML file that has tens of thousands of rows, port combos, and if-then statements, and it’s very hard to ingest this data,” Petersen said. “It would have taken us a couple of days to ingest those contracts and get them into our database; turns out OpenAI and others can ingest that thing and get it live into our marketplace in a few minutes. … I think you’re going to see that across the board in so many processes that were requiring manual intervention and are now able to be subjected to AI.”
Source: Flexport
