Dave sat alongside Simon Kaye of Jaguar Freight Services and Robert Khachatryan of Freight Right. Three forwarders, three different answers to the same question. Simon’s team rebuilt their whole operating system on a new platform in a matter of months. Robert wants everyone in his company, from operations to account management, building technology. Ours is different again.
Be the conductor, not the whole orchestra
We don’t try to build every piece of technology ourselves. Our core operating platform is widely adopted and does what we need operationally. Where it needs help, we bring in specialists. Gnosis gives us better ocean, rail and drayage milestones. Chain.io handles our integrations, and Dave calls them our data and process integrity partner. We’re now starting to use the AI work they’re doing, too.
Then OWL Vision brings all of it together in one customer-facing portal: POs, SKUs and product status, from PO issuance to empty container return. It has to be flexible and customizable, which is exactly why choosing the right partners matters so much.
We kind of see ourselves as the conductor of the orchestra, right? And we want to get the best musicians in that we possibly can, and then just make sure we have everybody play well together so that the music that gets produced is the best possible.
What a forwarder has to own
The host pushed on a fair point. If every forwarder buys the same best-of-breed tools, how do you stand out? What do you have to own yourself, and what’s just a commodity, like the layout of a house bill?
Dave named two things. First, the process and data integrity of taking the purchase order at the very beginning and following it all the way through. Second, the business intelligence on top: how customers can query, manipulate and use that data to run their business. Tracking a container is the easy part.
It gets down to, you know, where’s my product? How many are still on order? How many have been booked? How many are on the water? How many have landed? How many have been cleared?
That’s the view OWL Vision is built to give: where the product is, and what needs to happen to get it where it needs to be, on time.
The Amazon effect has reached freight
Asked whether shippers now expect forwarders to move at the speed of new technology, Dave didn’t hesitate. “Everyone expects everything to happen immediately.” People use AI and instant apps in their personal lives, and they expect their business partners to bring the same kind of solutions, quickly.
The host shared a story that shows what that looks like in practice. He and Dave had been on a call about one of our customers, a fast-growing importer whose purchase order data was messy, as it often is when buyers are moving fast. The customer was trying to send only a subset of its POs. With Chain.io’s AI, the answer turned out to be simpler: send all of them, and let the AI filter out the ones that aren’t needed. Before, he said, that might have been a two-year project.
How to ask a forwarder about technology
When the panel turned to the questions a small or mid-sized shipper should ask in an RFP, Dave’s advice was practical. Ask the right technical questions, but also the operational questions the technology is meant to solve. Approach it purely from the tech side and you can lose sight of what you’re trying to accomplish.
If it’s just an RFP where you’re asking 10 questions around technology and you’re just looking to check boxes, that’s not necessarily really going to tell you the story.
Leave time to dig into the answers and ask the next question. That, in Dave’s words, is where the rubber meets the road. The host put it neatly: the better questions are the essay questions, not the multiple choice.
Getting past the rate per container
Technology and rates both get commoditized. The way out, Dave said, is to take the time to find a customer’s specific need, a real pain point, and solve it with service and technology together.
Now you start to have a different conversation than what’s your rate per container or your rate per kilo or whatever the case may be.
AI is a tool. Trust is the relationship.
The last question was the big one: is AI changing the relationship between forwarders and their customers, or just the tools? Dave admitted he risked sounding like “the old guy,” then answered anyway. The basic relationship hasn’t changed. It still comes down to trust.
Our job is to bring the expertise, the ideas and the best practices, and to help customers solve their problems with the best tools available. AI is quickly becoming one of those tools, and we use it. It doesn’t replace knowing the trade, or picking up the problem when a vessel rolls.
I don’t think the basic relationship is changing. I just think that we have to be prepared to use the best tools available to do what we do for a living.
Watch the panel
Each part of Dave’s answer is on the panel recap page as its own short clip, ready to share.
