#254 EASE Logistics & jakib

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the Lay of the Land Podcast. I am your host Jeffrey Stern and today's episode is a crossover episode republished from the Ohio Fund Report, a companion podcast where I explore some of the most ambitious companies and builders shaping Ohio's future. Stories that feel right at home here on Lay of the Land. So with that, please enjoy hello everyone

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:57]:
today on the Ohio Fund Report, we're setting the stage for a conversation led by Mark Kwame, co founder, CEO and CIO of the Ohio Fund with Peter Quartola, Founder and CEO of Ease Logistics, and Andy Jenks, Co founder of Jacob what does it take for AI to matter inside of a real operating business? Not as a demo or a dashboard or as a generic productivity tool, but as something that improves service and helps people spend more time doing the work that actually moves the business forward. Together, Mark, Peter and Andy unpack one of the clearest examples we've seen of applied AI in Ohio. A service heavy logistics business navigating a difficult freight market, partnering with an AI company to start small, solve real operational bottlenecks and eventually build an AI layer embedded directly into how Ease Logistics works. They discuss track and trace calls, customer service, quoting user adoption, CEO level ownership, and why AI at its best is less about labor offsetting and more about amplification of people and their so please enjoy this insightful conversation with Mark Kwame, Peter Cortola and Andy Jenks. Lay of the Land is brought to you and is proudly sponsored by Roundstone Insurance, headquartered in Rocky River, Ohio. Roundstone shares Lay of the Land's same passion for bold ideas and lasting impact from our community's entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders. Since 2005, Roundstone has pioneered a self funded captive health insurance model that delivers robust savings for small and medium sized businesses. They are part of the solution to rising healthcare costs, helping employers offer affordable, high quality care while driving job creation and economic growth throughout Northeast Ohio.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:37]:
Like many of the voices featured on Lay of the Land, including Roundstone's Founder and CEO Mike Schroeder. Roundstone believes entrepreneurship, innovation and community to be the cornerstones of progress. To learn more about how Roundstone is transforming employee health benefits by empowering employers to save thousands in per employee per year healthcare costs, please visit roundstoneinsurance.com Roundstone Insurance built for entrepreneurs, backed by innovation, committed to Cleveland.

Mark Kvamme [00:03:14]:
What we want to do here at the Ohio Fund is we want to do case studies of each one of our companies and how they're, how they're doing fun and interesting things. Obviously both of you guys are our Ohio Fund investees. I thought maybe it would be really quick. Peter, just give you a little bit about yourself and Ease and I'll do the same thing with Andy over there and we'll take it from there.

Andy Jenks [00:03:34]:
Sure.

Peter Coratola [00:03:34]:
Peter Cortolis, CEO, President of Ease Logistics started Ease just under 14 years ago. We're a logistics transportation warehouse company which as you learn through this very challenging, robust industry. And we partnered with the Ohio Fund and Jacob last year and have had some tremendous success both through thought leadership, obviously growing and then adopting AI inside our walls.

Mark Kvamme [00:03:59]:
Cool.

Andy Jenks [00:04:00]:
Nice. Yeah. And I've known you for a long time.

Mark Kvamme [00:04:03]:
Long time.

Andy Jenks [00:04:04]:
I'm Andy Jenks. I'm the J in Jacob and been been working with AI both as an investor and now as an operator for the last 18 months. Partnered with Peter about a year ish ago, year and a half ago. And you know, really, really focused on bringing AI transformation to service heavy businesses. So really trying to take the AI piece of it, make it not so scary, bring it into companies where they can leverage it, improve their business. And we're focused on growing top line. We're not focused on reducing headcount or any of those things. We're like really partnering with folks to try and help them grow.

Andy Jenks [00:04:48]:
Great.

Mark Kvamme [00:04:48]:
Well, I thought we would be good to just start from the beginning.

Peter Coratola [00:04:51]:
Sure.

Mark Kvamme [00:04:52]:
In the beginning. Started at the Columbus Crew where our suite was next to your suite, the Ohio Fund next to Ease Logistics. And you and I got to chat and we started talking about the business a little bit. And why don't you talk about early 24 because it was, it was a challenge. Early 24. 24, early 25. It was a pretty challenging time.

Peter Coratola [00:05:13]:
Yeah. So especially, you know, our industry heavily impacted by, you know, global economics from interest rates to supply chain. So in that time we all remember, right. Supply chains were upside down. Right. Bank interest rates, the cost to operate were very high. Right. Coming off of disruption in the industry from COVID Right.

Peter Coratola [00:05:34]:
Logistics was almost looked at as like A gold mine. So it flooded a lot of people into the industry, brought a lot of capacity, and so you brought a lot of trucks on opportunities, once it started to normal, normalize, right? It actually set a new kind of standing and operating from 23 to 24. What we found out in this, in the logistics space, right? Companies really can't carry these large robust teams and overhead if they want to, you know, be nimble and be able to operate and execute in the industry. Margins get compressed very quick, right? And then when you add delays, disruptions, international supply chain bottlenecks where microchips aren't coming over so cars aren't being built, right? Then you stop, you stop the business that are being filled with the trucks, right? So it kind of made the entire industry really take it, take a step back, so at ease, you know, you really had to look at, you know, historically, we grew by capitalizing on customers, by, by allocating people, right? You know, we, we separate ourselves by service 24, 7 service and having to give that service at Monday at noon, Saturday at midnight, right? When all those things compress and the industry really starts to show you that it's true colors, right? The ebbs and flows of it. The companies that are able to survive are the companies that really made changes to adapt, right? So that 2423 through 2425, there was a lot of learning, right? Ease. Again, historically, when we wanted to grow, we wanted to attack a customer. There was a calculation, right? You throw account managers and client service,

Mark Kvamme [00:07:07]:
approximately for every, I don't know what the rent, there's 5 million, $10 million of, of, of shipments. How many people would you have to

Peter Coratola [00:07:15]:
add on general, right? So about. In top line, about every two and a half million bucks would be a person, right? So that's, you know, it could be around 5 to 6,000 shipments. So, you know, there was a, there was a method now that was for account managers, but for every account manager, you would also have one support, one cs, right? Because with such a robust customer service model, you have to be able to, you got to stand behind what you, what you say, essentially, right? Companies that don't do this industry get weeded out quick. So we had to take a look back inside of our walls, right? How do we continue to service and grow, right? While also being able to increase the output. And historically, again, the model was throw bodies at it. But when you have to operate in an industry at 12, 13% of, you know, but the industry only allows 9 to 10 in the harshest times, right? It it challenges, it challenges you to figure out how are you going to do it without giving up the liberties or kind of what made you from a service standpoint.

Andy Jenks [00:08:12]:
And you had those market dynamics, right. With the increased capacity. Right. Which drove everything to the bottom. And then your differentiator of the service was that much harder.

Peter Coratola [00:08:22]:
Right. So then you see like a revenue per load decrease from 22 to 24 by almost like 30%. So we were doing the same amount of loads. Right. But it was 20% less revenue. And then also margin was compressed. Right. So how are, how do you survive that? But then also capitalize on other markets while not defaulting on the service.

Peter Coratola [00:08:43]:
Right. Which you start to understand. It's so easy to do. Right. To give up on the things that made you successful in the harshest times. Right. And it's one of those crazy things, you know, business owners or business leaders, every once in a while the moons line up and you get lucky. Right.

Peter Coratola [00:09:01]:
So right as this time. Right. Come knocking at the door, this, this huge evolution of AI being more accessible and adoptable. Right now you're coming from somebody that we've never had a customer portal or any type of portal. Right. So I believe that the customer and vendor experience is very important. So I was always very hesitant about technology.

Andy Jenks [00:09:24]:
Yep.

Peter Coratola [00:09:25]:
Although we've been named the most innovative logistics company. Right.

Andy Jenks [00:09:30]:
So your tech team has done a really good job of setting you up, but you guys were not right.

Peter Coratola [00:09:35]:
And that was by design. You know, our tech team would always, we do portals and all this. It was terror. I was terrified of somebody having a bad experience because the technology was not able to replicate the service, what a person can do. Right.

Mark Kvamme [00:09:50]:
So why don't we step back to kind of early 25. You and I got together.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:54]:
Nope.

Mark Kvamme [00:09:55]:
And we started talking about AI for sure, starting to play with it. And then of course, the MIT surveys come out, say 95% of all AI projects fail. And, you know, everyone, you know, use ChatGPT to ask them, you know, ask them to write a love letter to their wife.

Peter Coratola [00:10:09]:
Right.

Mark Kvamme [00:10:10]:
But other than that, it wasn't being, you know, that useful inside the enterprise. And so something that Jacob and we kind of talked about, I said, you know, if a piece of business is done with a 3 to 5 minute phone call, AI can do it.

Andy Jenks [00:10:25]:
Right.

Mark Kvamme [00:10:25]:
And so when you and I sat down, you know, I guess that's 18 months ago or something like that, we were in your office, I remember, and you said, hey, I'm spending $2 million a year approximately, with a group down in Guadalajara, 60 people that were just asking seven questions.

Peter Coratola [00:10:40]:
Yep.

Mark Kvamme [00:10:40]:
And so why don't you tell about one, why you had to do it in Guadalajara, why you had to do that. And then kind of how we looked at kind of our first project in AI, because I know Jake is big belief is if you can't get, you know, success in two to four weeks, you shouldn't do it. Because if you try to boil the ocean, it never works.

Andy Jenks [00:10:57]:
Right.

Mark Kvamme [00:10:57]:
Why don't we talk about that first project?

Peter Coratola [00:10:59]:
So when we brought up going back to that robust service model, one of the ways that we historically was combating that was let's outsource our track and trace. Right? And our track and trace is a series of questions. But you still have to have the human element, because every truck, every driver, every scenario has its own right. And you got to do it. You have to make these calls. So when we started talking about where can we focus, I think that was, for me, it was also an early indication of the kind of partnership as well, Right. It wasn't, let's just get into everyone's doing it. Let's.

Peter Coratola [00:11:36]:
Let's get away the, you know, being terrified of where to start and tell us, like you said, where are you making the most calls? So we look there, right? From a standpoint of this is our differentiator. So you want to. Let's. Let's attack. Our selling point, right? You know, was a little terrifying. But when we started looking at it and then also partnering with Jacob and then, you know, I guess the clarity of what we were trying to get at was, let's answer these questions. And right now you have a Bogota team that's right around a $2 million cost, and they're doing 70% of your calls, right? So you still got 30% of being done by domestic, Right. In a perfect world, this was a great avenue for us to say, you know, it's relatively low risk.

Peter Coratola [00:12:18]:
Let's, not, let's. Let's not part ways with the Bogota team yet, but let's see what AI can do, right? And let's deploy it and start seeing what, you know, the impact it can. And, you know, through that progression, I think what we kicked off, you know, five to six months later, around July or August, right. And then, you know, by September, you know, we were up to 25,000 calls a month. And by mid September, we were already planning the decrease of Bogota.

Andy Jenks [00:12:44]:
Right?

Peter Coratola [00:12:45]:
And that's six months from when we kicked off, right?

Andy Jenks [00:12:48]:
We went just that project.

Peter Coratola [00:12:49]:
Just that project. We were able to decrease almost $1.2 million in overhead. Right. The fascinating part, though, and again, this is the biggest thing for people that, you know, one of the biggest selling points for me, for the AI, was our service increase. Because now something that we were paying 2 million for, covering 70%. Right. We're paying a fraction for it. There's.

Peter Coratola [00:13:13]:
I firmly believe in the importance of human touch and the human emotion in part, in check calls and compliance. We don't want emotion, you know.

Mark Kvamme [00:13:21]:
So then are you unloaded?

Peter Coratola [00:13:22]:
Yes. Right. Or are you loaded?

Mark Kvamme [00:13:24]:
Right.

Andy Jenks [00:13:24]:
Yeah.

Peter Coratola [00:13:24]:
You know, and it's real emotional.

Mark Kvamme [00:13:26]:
Right.

Peter Coratola [00:13:26]:
You know, I ask, you cry. Right. Right. I always say it's like tsa, I'm not trying. You know, respectfully, we want everyone have a good experience, but you got to do it. You have to, you know, so we were able to see a decrease in our cost there, but it increased. So now that the AI bots were now handling 90%. Right.

Peter Coratola [00:13:44]:
So then this was like kind of the first indication was, we can invest, we can. We can confidently go in this direction. We don't have to give up the things that have made us successful. We can see an impact. Right?

Andy Jenks [00:13:54]:
Yes. Yeah.

Mark Kvamme [00:13:55]:
So I'm curious, Andy, on your perspective when you looked at that opportunity for Jacob, why did you think that was a good place to start?

Andy Jenks [00:14:02]:
So, to be totally honest, we didn't know that it was a good place to start, Peter, because you had told me. You were like, hey, talk to Peter. When I first talked to Peter, I was like, wow, this is a crazy good business, but, man, is it thin margin, man. Are there, like, real challenges to the business just from an operations perspective?

Mark Kvamme [00:14:20]:
Yeah.

Andy Jenks [00:14:21]:
And when you brought up the check calls and all this, I can remember, I came to this office and you gave us, like, not spreadsheets, but PowerPoints of just workflows. And if this, then that. And it was what people were doing. And that by itself lends itself to AI really nicely, like when you have a structured workflow that you can actually do.

Mark Kvamme [00:14:43]:
Yeah.

Andy Jenks [00:14:43]:
The biggest challenge that we had was the voice agents weren't yet ready for it. Right. So it was. It wasn't that AI couldn't interpret what was happening. Yeah, it was. It still sounded a little robotic. It still sounded like a call center. And he's so fanatical about the, you know, the experience and the service and eases.

Andy Jenks [00:15:03]:
Makes ease, you know, makes logistics easy kind of a thing that he was like, I'm not ready to turn this on because it's not. Because it couldn't do It.

Mark Kvamme [00:15:11]:
It just didn't meet his service.

Andy Jenks [00:15:13]:
It didn't meet the service levels. And so that, to me, was number one. When he showed up, I was like, oh, there's a perfect use case.

Mark Kvamme [00:15:19]:
Yeah.

Andy Jenks [00:15:19]:
And then after we started running through it, it was like, man, we need to put this on the back burner for a hot second. Let the technology catch up. How many calls did you and I have? All the different providers.

Mark Kvamme [00:15:29]:
Yeah, exactly.

Andy Jenks [00:15:30]:
And. And we were like, let's put it on the back burner and let's start attacking these other problems. Because now that we're in there, we see the process. And Amy, we didn't. It wasn't called Amy at the time, but Amy, which is his AI platform. When we were like, oh, well, Amy now has visibility into System X System, yeah. What else can we start doing? And that's where we spent, what, about another three weeks kind of working through some things, and then the technology catches up. And then as soon as the technology catches up, we get a new phone.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:03]:
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Mark Kvamme [00:16:59]:
Go back to that time. So one thing that Peter said very early on is his mark, real estate on the. On the desktops or of my account is very, very valuable. You have these guys, they look like stock traders. They have four different screens. And so you said, hey, you got to integrate it into something we already use every day.

Andy Jenks [00:17:15]:
Yeah.

Mark Kvamme [00:17:15]:
So nice and flexible AI, you don't need a ui. So you used Microsoft Teams to ask questions. So tell us some of those early discoveries with Microsoft Teams and how you did things.

Peter Coratola [00:17:25]:
Yeah, that was interesting. I think that's when Andy got it first. Like, this guy's going to be pain in mind, right? I was like, we need the full functionality of AI. We need all the cool stuff. But you also need to fit it into this box, right. Because real estate, I think anybody, any business leader, tech leader has an, you know, tech adoption is a challenge, right. And what you find out is it's, are the users, do they, are they going to use it? Is it, is it readily available? And for us, like Mark said, I always said the real estate on the screen is. So, you know, we have our tms, we have our email, we have our, our teams, we have all the different websites up for all our external portals and all this stuff, our capacity.

Peter Coratola [00:18:04]:
So all this stuff, right? So you got to break into one of these if you, if you want someone. So what, what we did or what Jacob did was be able for us to access our AI bot, so to speak, through teams. What we didn't realize we were doing at the time was we were building this essentially like environment for us to now build and test AI where our teams would be able to trigger the AI to do tasks, build confidence without fully having to commit to automation. Which was again, it's, you want to trust it. But for anything, when we drive service compliance, follow the process, all these things, there's intimidation factor of like, is it going to actually do what we say? So while the technology was catching up, then we paired it with the teams so we could actually trigger these calls, come back and evaluate them. So we turned everybody on the ops for account managers, scheduling also into, I guess, what do you know, UI testers as well. And we were able to get all this great feedback in live time saying, well, this was wrong, this was right. So we were perfecting it.

Peter Coratola [00:19:12]:
Not day, you know, not day over day, literally call over, call over call.

Andy Jenks [00:19:16]:
That's what was training the model.

Peter Coratola [00:19:18]:
Yeah, it was really cool.

Andy Jenks [00:19:19]:
Now you have this ability to take an off the shelf model. At the time, I forget which one it was. It may have been like Haiku or something like that, or Sonnet, an earlier version. And we were. And the team, by just using it and trying to get value from it, was actually making it much, much better because we had that, you know, insourced team doing the work.

Mark Kvamme [00:19:43]:
It's kind of like in the past software, we need this big old heavy lift, you know, it's like building a house. You have to, you know, get all the architectural drawings and fire all the contractors and you build the house and you move in. Whereas this was very much incremental. Super. Every week you were changing and sometimes it was very frustrating weeks, sometimes it was very happy weeks. And then so as you guys looked at that, I'm assuming you had the Same experience inside of ease. Each one of your account managers, some guys going this is amazing. Other guys saying it's a waste of time.

Peter Coratola [00:20:12]:
Yeah. Both. Right. And transparently user adoption, even for how far we've come right now up to 300,000 AI execute any mean which user adoption and building that trust still. Right. And we've come a long way. But again, what we were viciously attacking at that point were our revenue generators, our account managers. Where are they bottlenecking? Right.

Peter Coratola [00:20:39]:
And how can we slowly build that trust? And then that's what we saw. Right. And then once we started adding a little more features, like Andy said, now we can read our data. Now it can maybe write. We saw this like almost overnight. I remember sitting on the ops for Wednesday, right. Like September, when we started adding more

Andy Jenks [00:20:56]:
LM September, it was October. They were inflection points.

Peter Coratola [00:21:01]:
Yeah. And asking everybody in the for like who uses AI on a daily basis and maybe like 20% of the before. Right. We turned it all on, had some, you know, basic functions. Right. Like the legitimately the next day the conversations inside the team chats were just exponentially different. It wasn't, hey, this load's available is hey, if I'm put, you know, lead time on this route by 48 hours is increasing. We're seeing a better booking rate by, you know, 3% or whatever.

Peter Coratola [00:21:28]:
I mean it. It changed overnight. You can start to see the excitement. Right. I think. I think excitement builds both through. Are you taking workload off me? That's not helping me get better. But are she also giving me insights to help me smarter?

Andy Jenks [00:21:40]:
This was like a real interesting insight. Too early was when we were looking for these other projects to work on while we were. Because we knew some of these language models or the voice models were going to start stepping up. We could see that coming. So we were like, maybe if we just give it one more rev of that as we were waiting, we would just go to people. Peter would go to people and he'd say, you know, this person, their day, every day when they show up starts with this report or before they leave, they have to do this. Or there's a handoff between shift A and shift B and this is what goes into that handoff. We just started systematically attacking those things.

Andy Jenks [00:22:17]:
Not necessarily from a technology perspective of we got to go build all these features. It was literally, how do you build a prompt? How do you build an interface where somebody says, well, when I show up, I just either hit a button and it does everything for me in my teams, in my Email in wherever I'm at and I can copy, paste, send. And all of a sudden my day went from my first 15, 20 minutes sucking because I have to go pull all this stuff to like, I hit a button, I'm done. And now I'm on with my day. Right. That's the insight that E figured out early, which is how do we systematically go from person to person, basically, you know, function to function and try and make their, their day better. Yeah.

Mark Kvamme [00:22:59]:
I mean, one thing you're telling me before. Yeah, no, I think that's perfect. I mean you were telling me before that it took, I thought you said, if I remember correctly, 72 clicks to on average to get a load done.

Andy Jenks [00:23:10]:
Yeah.

Mark Kvamme [00:23:10]:
And why don't we talk about a little bit about the numbers now? I mean, what you saw, and we're talking about the adoption curve, but Right. Maybe a good idea saying, okay, where are, where, what are we doing now?

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:20]:
Yeah.

Peter Coratola [00:23:21]:
So I want to make sure I get these right. Because actually I was looking at them and they're so astound, Astounding. So. Right.

Andy Jenks [00:23:28]:
I mean they're almost, they, they're kind of unbelievable. They are, they really are.

Peter Coratola [00:23:32]:
Right. So we're talking about like those, those transactions now for the, for the humans that are clicks that are doing it, you know, we're down to 15 to 20. We're talking about the, the compliance steps. I used to take 10 minutes if everything went perfect. Now it's down to less than two minutes. Right. When we look at just those operational tasks. So like in this last quarter, on average it's like what, 1600, 1600 hours saved just on operational tasks, right.

Peter Coratola [00:24:02]:
On transactional, like execution, quoting, we're talking 5,000. So last last month Amy helped us quote 62,000 opportunities. Right? So now we're seeing, we're visually attacking the operational stuff where again, it's very important. It's, it's our service model. You can't, we can't operate without it.

Andy Jenks [00:24:22]:
Right.

Peter Coratola [00:24:22]:
But now we're moving into revenue generating, right? So we're seeing 60,000 quotes quoted a month. We're seeing 7,000 hours saved in these small transactional quotes, right. We're being able to capture the hours ape saves you money, right? And you, and in our, in our space, right, when you deal with robust technologies and you have opportunities come through every, every way emails, EDI and all this stuff, right. How you differentiate yourself in today's market is how do you increase what we. The out per person without giving up your service? Right? So we, we created the acronym Speed shipment per ease Employee daily. And we've been able to now track. And the only way for us to increase it across the organization is tech adoption through AI. Right.

Peter Coratola [00:25:07]:
And going all the way back to your first question, how we think, unbeknownst to me, you all are longer and stronger. The tech game was, I think, something we did great was we were giving them. You know, a lot of companies will go out there and give AI and it'll just deliver insights. I think we paired insights with execution really early on. That's a very good point. And I think that built confidence to help us get to this point because AI is great at giving insights. But if the moment you start giving the actual like execution part and get into people's hands, I think that that was a huge game changer for us in terms.

Andy Jenks [00:25:41]:
And that's one of the hardest things to do is because the insights sometime are actually not that insightful. Right, right. Because like, you know.

Mark Kvamme [00:25:48]:
Right.

Andy Jenks [00:25:48]:
Peter, like, you know, our interface, we have multiple models running underneath of all his stuff.

Mark Kvamme [00:25:54]:
Yeah.

Andy Jenks [00:25:55]:
They challenge each other. Like, we do all the mixture of expert. We do all the things. And Peter would be like, that's just Walt, Maria. And it's not because it's. It's wrong. It's technically probably right. It's wrong for Peter's business.

Mark Kvamme [00:26:08]:
Right.

Andy Jenks [00:26:08]:
So for his business, it's wrong. Yeah.

Mark Kvamme [00:26:11]:
I mean, you and I were talking about it kind of early on. What. You know, because you built this amazing company, everything kind of comes through you. Your experience in logistics business. What we've done with the AI and what Jacob's done is basically downloaded your brain into it. So instead of having. You said this comment to me, instead of having. When you have a new trainee, you know, you'd have to spend six months getting them up to speed.

Peter Coratola [00:26:33]:
Right.

Mark Kvamme [00:26:33]:
Now that new trainee can come in and be up to speed instantly.

Peter Coratola [00:26:37]:
Instantly. Right. I mean, the, the, the run rate now for people, for new hires, being able to make an impact.

Andy Jenks [00:26:43]:
Right.

Peter Coratola [00:26:44]:
Is exponentially lower. We're right where not only are we able to track their performance or they. And seeing what they're using Amy for. Right. They're able to know our processes. Amy also becomes like this AI assistant or somewhere along the other account manager. AI assistant turned into Amy. Not really sure how he got there.

Mark Kvamme [00:27:03]:
Yeah.

Peter Coratola [00:27:03]:
But now it's, you know, it's like you have. You have the experience of somebody with a decade or 20 years essentially sitting right by these account managers. Right. This is what you should quote. This is, you know, this is our service process. Hey, these loads are running late. Right. And that really starts to position you again.

Peter Coratola [00:27:22]:
Right. Especially going back to in our industry where every. Everybody we bring in has to make an impact. So the quicker they can make an impact, the better off we are. And we can now start to deliver those cost savings. I mean, the bottom line is a big one, but to our customers, and then, you know, conquer, go, execute, capitalize more opportunities without having to throw the same amount of bodies before. Again, not looking to take people out of work. We're really elevating the work and elevating the output.

Andy Jenks [00:27:53]:
Yeah, they're doing real work.

Mark Kvamme [00:27:55]:
They're not just clicking spreadsheets and all. Right. They're now focused on the customer versus focused on their email.

Andy Jenks [00:28:01]:
Right. You're hiring somebody to do the job that they're hired to do.

Mark Kvamme [00:28:04]:
Right.

Andy Jenks [00:28:05]:
Not all this other stuff. Right.

Peter Coratola [00:28:06]:
And that's like, that was one. Somewhere along the lines. It's, you know, you think of it that way. I started looking at what if your account managers are your salespeople. 90% of their time was focused on those first two bullet points. Right. Talk to your customers, add ad loads or ad revenue. Right.

Peter Coratola [00:28:23]:
But, you know, 2 through 10 is make sure your loads are tracked, make sure you're service, make sure you're compliant. Right. Which a lot of times those would eat up a lion's share of the time just because there's only so many minutes a day and you got to get a driver on the phone, you got to do these things and it takes seconds, takes minutes. When you get, when you get those, you know, your, your A players, any player to be able to just do one or two things, right. What if 90% of your time was always focusing on your customer? What if 90% of your. What about when we get to 100% right now your output per individual can start to go up. So again, we can, we can capitalize market share, we can be more nimble how we operate. We can deal with the ebbs and flows of the industry while securing more market share.

Peter Coratola [00:29:07]:
So it's been quite the ride of seeing that all play out.

Andy Jenks [00:29:10]:
Yeah, it's pretty remarkable to watch, like, because everybody thinks about AI. If you take that word out of it and you just say we're matching kind of the digital world and the physical world, and we're taking all the things that you have to do in the physical world, automating a lot of it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:26]:
Right.

Andy Jenks [00:29:27]:
Some of it is proper AI, like magic box. Some of it is just like automation. And I Think that that's the thing that AI has like been the tip of the spear or the wedge into these, into these industries, into these companies. Like, ease. Like if it was just another, hey, I've got a new like SaaS product that competes with Salesforce. You'd probably be like, man, you know what, I'm good. Right? But AI opened the door where you're like, well, there's this big wave coming. I gotta at least figure that out.

Andy Jenks [00:29:58]:
We started with the Guadalajara project or, you know, and like, and it turned into this. Well, I also need to do this and do this and do this. And some of that is proper, like magicy things and some of that is just like getting the automation back to where it is because the infrastructure was set. So like the tech team had done their job, they built, you know, you got your data warehouse and all those normal things and it was, it's not just a, let me just sell you a SaaS product, right? It's like, let's match the digital world to the physical world. What do you do in the physical world that we can map to the digital world and how do we put that together and make you more efficient? That was the coolest thing for me. Like, this project has been like one of the most fun. I mean, it's good. It's getting a text from peter at like 3 o' clock in the morning.

Mark Kvamme [00:30:44]:
Yeah, no, it's funny. It's like, no, let's just flip it around. It's kind of. We were together with Zach yesterday over at Jacob offices and I asked Zach, you know, why are you able to attract such world class engineers? Because, you know, they can go to Meta, they can go to Google, they can go to all these different places.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:00]:
They can.

Mark Kvamme [00:31:01]:
He said Action used to use as an example. He says, you know, we got these amazing engineers and they can in real time see how their code works. So they can post it up at 2:00 clock and you guys are using it at 6:00am and that's super cool. And so for the engineers to get instant feedback, I think that's the one thing is we talked about it, it's an iterative process. The minute you try to boil the ocean, it's never going to work.

Andy Jenks [00:31:21]:
Right.

Mark Kvamme [00:31:22]:
And so I think I would say my next question is for Andy, as you kind of, which, you know, we've talked about a lot of things Peter's learned in this whole process. Obviously, you know, you had a young company, you were building it, what have you, you know, you've been a technologist forever. What did you learn in this process?

Andy Jenks [00:31:41]:
The. The biggest learning is that you can't take the models at face value. I would say, like, we've talked to. I've talked to so many people. I mean, you and I have talked to so many people. And, like, when I was investing, like, there's a lot of truth to the hype. So, like, I think the hype is real. I think the truth is real.

Andy Jenks [00:32:04]:
But you can't just say, I'm gonna buy, you know, X model off the shelf, or I'm gonna go hugging face and I'm gonna download the latest model that does, you know, vision really well, or latest. Kimmy does this. You really have to have a partner. Like, you really have to have a real project to be working on, because each one of those models, like, nobody cares about benchmarks.

Mark Kvamme [00:32:29]:
No.

Andy Jenks [00:32:29]:
Like, Peter doesn't care that, like, Opus 4.7 is better at a math benchmark than Codex 5. 4. Like, he doesn't care about that. You don't think about that, Peter. So it's like. So it's like, what have I learned? I learned that, like, it's 101 of normal software, which is like, find a real problem that a customer has and go solve the problem. The difference is that now we have the tools. So, like, I would say that the biggest factor for the Jacob side of the house is we can do way more with less people.

Andy Jenks [00:33:02]:
And they are now superhuman. Like, it's not just. They're a little better, they're, like, supercharged, and they can do things that would take, you know, two months. Previously, a lot of the plumbing work, DevOps stuff. I mean, you know, all this, like, that you would actually, like. There are whole companies built to go solve these problems. Right? And now one engineer can do an entire cic, like, an entire pipeline of cogen and delivery in, like, an hour, which used to take way longer. And so, like, I gotta tell you,

Mark Kvamme [00:33:34]:
I was watching this podcast last night with Ed Sheeran and Benny Blanco, and in the end of the podcast, they decide to go make a song then. Okay. And I was kind of Benny, Blanca was Jacob.

Andy Jenks [00:33:46]:
Okay.

Mark Kvamme [00:33:46]:
It's Sharon is ease.

Andy Jenks [00:33:48]:
Yeah.

Peter Coratola [00:33:48]:
You're.

Mark Kvamme [00:33:49]:
You're creating the music. Yeah. You're saying, I want to do this. And then he's integrating and moving it around. And, oh, let's try this. Let's try. Oh, let's use this tool. Let's use that tool.

Mark Kvamme [00:33:56]:
And they're doing it, like, in real time. And, like, that's the things I saw.

Andy Jenks [00:34:01]:
This is the Thing that's insane is like Peter, again, love Peter. Not a technologist, okay. But knows that's true, knows how to move freight. Like he'll call me and be like, I'm just moving freight. Knows how to move freight, right? So like that's what he knows how to do. So our team, so Peter is, is a. Effectively the product manager for Amy, right? Peter calls our team all the time, is like, hey, I'd like to see this, I'd like to see that, I'd like to do this, I'd like to do that. So because of AI on our side, at least, which directly impacts Peter, we've now built Peter his own kind of almost like Claude, cowork esque type harness inside of Amy where he can go create features on her on his own.

Andy Jenks [00:34:44]:
It flows back into our entire CICD pipeline. It does. Like before something gets pushed, like we have a human review it. But Peter's now committing code changes that he doesn't know he's committing, that we are, we are reviewing and it's getting pushed out into the Amy product like that. Now granted, we're not going to give that to everybody, but the point is like, that was impossible.

Mark Kvamme [00:35:10]:
Impossible, yes.

Andy Jenks [00:35:11]:
You wouldn't even attempt it. And now we're like, I don't know. Peter seems to know what he's doing, so like, let's just give him the tools to go.

Peter Coratola [00:35:19]:
Exactly.

Andy Jenks [00:35:19]:
And he's doing it.

Mark Kvamme [00:35:20]:
Exactly.

Peter Coratola [00:35:20]:
It was a pretty creative way to Caged. Yeah, Caged aunt.

Andy Jenks [00:35:24]:
Yeah. I mean, I mean, getting all these texts from Peter at all times of the day, it's like, you know, just let him do it.

Peter Coratola [00:35:30]:
Once you get through that, you know, again, like once you see that this technology can reflect your business how you want it, right? And like you said, if when we were doing the check calls on that, we all, you know, we didn't like it. You don't have to submit a ticket and wait for someone to go code it. And it, I mean, if we didn't like how that call went, we could say, hey, let's, let's make it. And I mean, boom, right? So then you start seeing that, right? Then you start seeing the impact. And that was where, you know, they, they put me and this box, not good box where it was like, we can't, you know, we gotta go back to how we started this. Let's, let's, let's solve problems. Because once you start really seeing once AI knows your business or once you find a partner that knows your business and is not trying to Just sell you general AI and they know your business. Then that's like, when it really becomes fun.

Peter Coratola [00:36:21]:
And you see why there's this group of people that are so excited about it. It's gonna change. And either you accept the reality, right? Or the company that's. The company that's gonna challenge you the most are the people that. That did accept it, right? Cause you start seeing, I can solve this, I can solve that, I can solve this.

Andy Jenks [00:36:38]:
It's really funny because the questions become like, can I do. It's not. It's. It's not nothing new per se. It's more like, I can now actually do it right. I can point it. I can do it right. And before we take an army of engineers and back to your point, like, on the Jacob team, we have, I think, what we counted yesterday.

Andy Jenks [00:36:59]:
It's like. Well, it's like seven former founder.

Peter Coratola [00:37:03]:
Oh, yeah.

Andy Jenks [00:37:04]:
CTOs are now all wanting to be part of Jacob because we're working on really hard problems like this. And when you give a really smart engineer a really hard problem, like, and again, the craziest of all of them is, let's give the CE A the ability to write code into his own platform. That's a challenge. A lot of engineers may be like, that's a really bad idea. But our engineers were like, no, that's actually a great idea. Because he knows his business better than we do. We didn't know anything about logistics when we showed up. Now we know a little bit more.

Andy Jenks [00:37:40]:
But like, no, you know, you know,

Mark Kvamme [00:37:42]:
your business maybe moving forward here. So, I mean, AI's got a lot of. Obviously it's the height factor. I actually think it's under hyped, in my opinion. But, you know, you hear a lot of stuff about people, you know, using AI to cut workforces and cut this and cut that. You're kind of doing the exact reverse. You're now blossoming and able to do more. So tell a little bit about that story.

Peter Coratola [00:38:06]:
Yeah. So we look at it as like a multiplier, right? A multiplier for the. For the individual. Right. Can they. Can they adopt it? Can they use it? Right. Can we. Can we viciously attack some of those redundant processes?

Andy Jenks [00:38:18]:
Right.

Peter Coratola [00:38:19]:
Remember, we live in a very robust industry.

Andy Jenks [00:38:22]:
Right.

Peter Coratola [00:38:23]:
Taking those clicks out a day just gets somebody back more time. That's just the operational transaction stuff.

Andy Jenks [00:38:29]:
Right?

Peter Coratola [00:38:30]:
We start layering the AI insights. The AI ability better engage with customers, carriers. Right. We're talking about increasing once. Was it 12, 13 loads per. Per. Per person? Yeah.

Andy Jenks [00:38:42]:
Right.

Peter Coratola [00:38:43]:
To 3035 loads per person. Right. Like, to put in perspective for us, that takes a company where our size, right. With the same amount of people. Right. We can almost double double revenue. Double our revenue. Right.

Peter Coratola [00:38:57]:
Double our volume count without giving up service.

Andy Jenks [00:39:01]:
Right.

Peter Coratola [00:39:01]:
We can again run leaner from a standpoint of our operating. Our operating margin can operate at 7, 8.

Andy Jenks [00:39:08]:
Right.

Peter Coratola [00:39:08]:
You can pass that on. But all the volume, all that opportunity now also passes to the individual so they can make more, they could do more. Right. So, you know, it bothers me as well when AI almost becomes synonymous as a job taker.

Andy Jenks [00:39:24]:
Right.

Peter Coratola [00:39:25]:
To me, it's 1,000% a job. You know, extrapolator in a way. Right?

Andy Jenks [00:39:29]:
Yeah, we've talked about it. It's like the concept that a lot of people talk are saying, and it's true, is like this Jevons paradox. Like the more technology you give people, the more access you give people, the more you're going to get.

Peter Coratola [00:39:42]:
Right.

Andy Jenks [00:39:43]:
And so like he's getting a lot more.

Peter Coratola [00:39:45]:
Right.

Andy Jenks [00:39:45]:
Which is kind of crazy.

Peter Coratola [00:39:47]:
And they're do. And it's challenging them more from a standpoint of like they don't have to do. Again, we keep going back to those operational tasks. And I promise you the numbers are a lot more than operational tasks. Right. Amy. Amy contributed to $8 million in additional revenue. That 100% was AI Joe in this last quarter.

Peter Coratola [00:40:05]:
Right. 300,000 AI transactions. So it's, it's more than that, but it's also making some of those roles more exciting, right? Like how they talk to their customers.

Mark Kvamme [00:40:18]:
You're not doing the drudgery work. You're able to do the work that's really.

Peter Coratola [00:40:21]:
So you get to go in front of customers or carriers. And rather than talk about maybe just standard service KPIs, we're talking about like very intricate things going on their supply chain, dwell times, new routing. Right. We're able to put these things.

Mark Kvamme [00:40:36]:
You just mentioned us. I mean, you had a big meeting this morning, right. But talk about how now your customers are using it, right Inside of Amy, getting, delivering things they could never get before actually making it better through their business as well.

Peter Coratola [00:40:48]:
So that's something. Again, over the last three months, we pushed out, remember, this is a timeline of, you know, like nine months. Right. So now we're able to extend the AI functionality, the AI impact to our customers. Right. Do our customers have to use Amy to work better with us? No. Does it make it easier? Absolutely. Do we get more efficient? Do they get more efficiency? So we've been able to Pass, you know, what we've built in Amy and AI and now give it right to our customer hands.

Peter Coratola [00:41:19]:
So our customers now, you know, some Fortune 10, some you know, mid, mid market where you know, either they're so big that it's hard to get any AI initiative going or they're, you know, they're a mid market where, you know, in those manufacturing industrial, they don't have, they're not investing in AI now. So we're able to also pass this on to our customers where they're able to now see the impact of AI, right. Work with us easier, work with us better. Right. And give us great feedback on what they're seeing. You know, in a perfect world there's a whole subset of customers that, right. Can just use Amy to help manage their supply chain.

Mark Kvamme [00:41:55]:
Right.

Peter Coratola [00:41:56]:
And it triggers our control tower, right. To execute. But they have the consistent at their fingertips all the time, essentially AI account manager that allows them to manage their transportation. Because in our industry not all customers want to have an account manager. Right. And for us, E specific, that is a part of the industry we've never been able to capture because we've always been, I would say we, I grew, I've always been ocd. I've always, you know, the human has to respond in two minutes, human has to pick up the phone right there. There's a subset of customers now that we're able to tap into and we're able to deliver this robust service model to everybody.

Peter Coratola [00:42:34]:
And knowing it's, they're going to have a good experience because it's been built from the ground up and it, and it knows how we operate and when we adjust things, it adjusts as well.

Andy Jenks [00:42:42]:
Yeah. I mean what's interesting is, is like Peter brought me into a couple meetings with some of your customers. Some of them are very, very large and they're like, yeah, we've got a big consultancy like McKinsey in here and they've given us, you know, the 14 month roadmap and the PowerPoint presentation probably cost a million dollars.

Peter Coratola [00:43:00]:
Right.

Andy Jenks [00:43:00]:
You know, Right. And in the meantime, before that one, that meeting specifically on is probably on a Sunday. Peter is like, hey, you know, X customer is going to be in here on Tuesday. Can we have an AI portal for them? So that way they can just interact with their loads. And guess what? It was done. It was done and they were blown. They were like, this would take them forever. Right.

Andy Jenks [00:43:24]:
You know, we've got consultants and dev shops and all these people and you know, all the big logos telling us that this was, was going to take us like six to nine months to just even get a prototype going. Right? Exactly. And like we had it done in two days. That's not because we're awesome. It's because Peter knows exactly what the customer needs and he's just able to communicate that back to a team that knows how to leverage these tools in a way that can get a method in two days. It's pretty remarkable. I mean, this is, this is why it's exciting to be building tech and being in business. Like, I'd say that like if you're a cert.

Andy Jenks [00:43:59]:
If you're a business like Peter's and you got heavy service, like it's the most exciting time. It's not terrifying. A lot of people find it terrifying. If you're taking the approach that Peter is, it's the most exciting time to be building and growing your.

Mark Kvamme [00:44:11]:
Well, actually, let's go on that point. Okay, so Peter, take yourself out of ease and you're at the Columbus Crew game and XYZ guy comes up and says, I have a hundred million dollar company. How do they get started? I mean, what's the mindset they need to have to get started.

Peter Coratola [00:44:26]:
So one thing they just to go on that point was I don't have a robust technology experience. Right. So just don't let that scare anybody when he says Peter can now talk to the engineer. Right. My, my, my depth of technology is, you know, if something was broke, I could, knew how to unplug and plug it back, you know, so like I, I don't know how. Yeah, right. So I, I want any, I want everybody to hear on that point. Right.

Peter Coratola [00:44:52]:
Like, no, right there. I, I don't know the, the. Right. No, you know what I mean? But I, I do know my business. I knew how to articulate what's important and that's.

Andy Jenks [00:45:00]:
Right.

Peter Coratola [00:45:01]:
So that was a big thing. And I think it' like when we're talking about this, I, I don't know code, I don't know the difference between SQL or ap. I don't even know. There's same things. You know, what AI and what a great partnership allowed me to do is just communicate what's critically important. Yeah, right. Critically important. And know the business.

Peter Coratola [00:45:19]:
Right. And then where, where can we go solve problems? Right. So if somebody's looking to get an AI, right. Finding a business partner that comes in and their first 10 questions are asking about your business, I think is super important. Right? What, what AI has done. Also people have really great, people are really good at giving presentations this day. Yeah. You know, and, and I'm not trying to make it hard for the AI companies, but when you're a business owner, you want to make sure that you're spending your time and partnering with people that are going to make an impact.

Peter Coratola [00:45:49]:
Right. So knowing the company that's going to ask questions about what's important to you, how do you operate, what are your systems? Right. And getting that out lay of the land. Right. And then all the way back to our first point, right. What is that transaction that is being done every day that's important, right? Is it responding to one email? Just start. Don't boil the ocean. Start small.

Peter Coratola [00:46:11]:
Right. In nine months, we started with Outbound 7 Questions and now we have fully integrated interactive AI portals where autonomous, you know, we're tracking all of our opportunities, we're able to adjust pricing and lifetime. We're paying. Right. So it happens right now I will say we got there through some, I would say, great coaching of saying tough coaching, love. Right. Of we will get there. Right.

Peter Coratola [00:46:39]:
But let's again, let's remember the timeframe we're talking about. So that's what's Right.

Mark Kvamme [00:46:43]:
So, so he just said, hey, what you have to the mindset of the CEO and so on. You just recently said you went into company, did their business analysis and it wasn't right for AI.

Andy Jenks [00:46:54]:
What was it?

Mark Kvamme [00:46:55]:
Yeah, so what you, what are you

Andy Jenks [00:46:57]:
analyzing for from what the first thing is? It's, it's kind of like what you do in venture. It's, you got to assess the founder, right. And the, and the owner of the business in this case. But more importantly, it's like when somebody, when you go in and you talk to somebody and they're like, you know, I, I'd love to, you know, fire five people, it's like, okay, well that's not, that's not what we're here to do. Like, what we're here to do is we're here to help you take market share. So like the first thing is, is like what's the mentality of the business? Yeah. Number two is like, are you in a big enough market? Like again, coming back to the extra 101, it's like, are you in a big enough market where if you change, like if you make a 5% impact to the business, you're adding millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars to you. On my, like that answer is yes, continue.

Andy Jenks [00:47:42]:
And then if you've got a founder, CEO, owner who is, I would say, open to you Know, being uncomfortable, because this is. It is uncomfortable. It's, you know, one that actually, you

Mark Kvamme [00:47:59]:
brought us some brig. I was with a very large financial institution, cbo, the other day, and I said, oh, what are you guys doing in AI? You know, so we're doing a little bit of this. A little bit. I said, how involved are you on. Oh, we got the guy to. I said, wrong.

Andy Jenks [00:48:12]:
All right?

Mark Kvamme [00:48:12]:
If you are not. If you do not think, if you're not waking up every morning saying, hey, how is. Am I going to address my business from. From a. From an AI perspective, then you're not going to go anywhere because it's got to come from the top.

Andy Jenks [00:48:26]:
It's got to come from the top. And like, you and I had this conversation yesterday when we were talking about, like, right now, we have been talking to CEOs, like, the Jacob. The Jacob model is like, we just kind of let our work do the talking, so to speak. But in order to make that truth happen, we gotta be at the right level inside of an organization. But I actually think that there's nothing wrong with that. I think that that is the answer, which is, like, you have to be able to find your way into a conversation with somebody where you can quickly evaluate, like, is this a person who hates change? Is this a person who's. I'm holding on for dear life? Or they're looking to sell and get out and get to the boat in Florida or whatever. But.

Andy Jenks [00:49:13]:
But I do think that, that finding the right partner, like, this is a part. He's. He's frustrated with me the same amount of time we get frustrated with each other.

Peter Coratola [00:49:24]:
He said, but it's true.

Andy Jenks [00:49:26]:
But it's. And it's like. But we have this trust and. And we've been able to prove it. And I think that that proof is really where it matters. And so, like, if you're waking up and you don't yet have a. If you've had. Of an AI initiative inside of your, like, labs or inside of your, like, test group or whatever, and it's not made you have this aha moment.

Andy Jenks [00:49:46]:
You're either got the wrong vendor, you've got the wrong person running it, or you're doing the wrong thing. Right? And so because everybody who adopts this type of mindset, like, I always say that 95% of all AI projects fail paper. And again, it's probably overstated. Let's just say, hypothetically, it's 50, right? Like, we have a 100% success rate. Like, 100%. Every person that you work with is 100% successful and can give a testimony similar to what Peter's giving. Not because, again, not because we've discovered fire. Like we're just using the tools the right way with the right customer and we found the customers with the right mentality and like if you're not that big, you know, financial institution, CEO, if they're not waking up saying that like I gotta get this to market asap, well then something's broken in their process.

Andy Jenks [00:50:39]:
Yeah, it's not that the tools aren't there, the teams aren't there, the will isn't there, something broken.

Mark Kvamme [00:50:46]:
We'll be wrapping up here. So you know Andy, you're a Silicon Valley guy, we talk about this often. We spend a lot of time together in Silicon Valley. Why do you think Ohio based companies are better positioned to implement a lot of this stuff than what's going on in the Valley?

Andy Jenks [00:51:03]:
Well, it's Peter, I mean it's all you, like it's all Peter. It's Peter and the other couple, like Chad, like there's plenty of folks here. But when you and I first talked about this and I, and I said to you, I was like, man, it's gonna, it's really hard to find what to invest in next. Right. And we had this whole conversation, I think we were at dinner and it was just kind of like, you know, if you had a $100 billion fund. Well, if you're masa and you're like I can put a 20 billion bet on OpenAI or a hundred billion dollar bet on anthropic. Great, that's a model that can work if you're going to raise a fund or if you're going to invest in companies, start looking at the ones that are actually implementing AI. Well, who is implementing AI? The target audience for every single model company that's getting built.

Andy Jenks [00:51:57]:
Sure. Today it's devs and I, and I wholeheartedly believe that. But the devs customer, the dev's customer customer is Peter. Right. It's not more devs, it's Peter. And it's people who have service heavy businesses that are at, you know, north of, call it a hundred, two hundred million dollars in revenue who can actually make the investment, who want to change and transform their business in a way that's like using applied AI, which is what we say we do. We are applied AI. That's why it works in Ohio, because if you shake a stick, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of these companies and there's no lack of people who it's the Ohio.

Andy Jenks [00:52:39]:
It's the kind of Midwest spirit of like who are grinders and they want to work and they want their business to be successful. And so it, it is kind of a, an interesting way to say that like Silicon Valley can build it. Right. And you guys can take advantage of it for sure. And so I think that that's, and I think that that's why like I'm so bullish on what you're doing quite frankly is like I think that this economy is going to reap the rewards of a lot of the efficiencies that somebody like we were just talking like he, he could be a multi billion dollar company based right here in hence why. Right. And so it's like. And it's taking advantage of this stuff.

Mark Kvamme [00:53:18]:
Okay, last question. And this is where you're going to get in trouble. Give me a prediction. In your business or technologically a Jacob that is pretty extraordinary in the next two years. But you would, you wouldn't be surprised that it happens. So something that's just out there but you. There is a greater than 50% chance

Andy Jenks [00:53:45]:
that happens that you want an impression.

Peter Coratola [00:53:48]:
Yeah, I'll let you let me.

Andy Jenks [00:53:49]:
Okay. I'll give it, I'll give a TEP prediction and then I'll give an ease prediction. I wouldn't be surprised if we had data centers in space.

Mark Kvamme [00:53:56]:
Yep. In two years.

Andy Jenks [00:53:58]:
I agree. Which sounds insane. And then you get into the Dyson sphere and all this craziness, you know. But if we really are going to take advantage of everything that we've got, we do have to have more power. Like people are selling AI by the gigawatt. Right, right. So. And, and I think that there's an efficiency curve that you have to ride.

Andy Jenks [00:54:23]:
Right. And with Elon bringing the cost of launches way down. Yeah. I think that that efficiency curve can go straight to space. Now there's a lot of problems with that, but whatever. I think that's work too. I think Peter, I think the ease business, when I first met Peter it was like an October November timeframe and you were like hey, met this, this guy. It's a pre game.

Andy Jenks [00:54:47]:
He's got this business. This is a great business but it's in a really tough market. And we, you and I have looked at the 3 PL market previously from a venture nose.

Mark Kvamme [00:54:57]:
Exactly.

Andy Jenks [00:54:58]:
And we've said no. Yeah, tough business.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:00]:
Tough business.

Peter Coratola [00:55:01]:
Transparent hurt.

Andy Jenks [00:55:03]:
When I first showed up, I told you, I was like pass. Yeah, thank you for the honesty. And you know your business was going through some inflection points. So from that point in time, so two years from now, I wouldn't be surprised. It would not put it this way. It would not be surprising. It would not surprise me. If Ease is doing, you know, north.

Andy Jenks [00:55:29]:
They're doing north of a 10% kind of gross margin business that is wildly profitable and is able to go take the market.

Mark Kvamme [00:55:42]:
It's a trillion and a half dollar market.

Andy Jenks [00:55:44]:
That's what I'm saying.

Mark Kvamme [00:55:45]:
It could be a multi billion dollar company.

Andy Jenks [00:55:46]:
That's what I'm saying. And be able to take.

Mark Kvamme [00:55:48]:
Okay, I'm putting that in the board plan.

Andy Jenks [00:55:49]:
Right. Basically I think I wouldn't be surprised if, if you're able to, to drop, to drop your gross margin to a point where you're making money and nobody else is and then you're able to go put a little bit of a stranglehold on the market. I wouldn't have said that when I first met you. I'd have been like hold on for dear life. And now it's like you're in the drivers. So I would say $100 million of gross profit in the next 12 months.

Peter Coratola [00:56:18]:
All right, let's do your. All right, let's see. Personally, I think in by two years I don't see myself ever doing a PowerPoint again because I will always be doing them for me. Right. I think in the next few years inside of our industry and industries like ours, I think that you're going to see the reemergence of the importance of human, human or relationships. Actually holding relationships with customers. I think we've gotten away from a little bit and it's already been about service and compliance. We're in the next few years.

Peter Coratola [00:56:50]:
I think AI is going to make everybody, everybody deliver a high level of service, everybody be compliant, everybody be able to be solved problems. So it's going to reemerge the importance of the human touch and the people that respect and appreciate and put time into building relationships and knowing how to get in front of people. I think you're going to see the kind of re emergence of, of that happen right inside of our walls. I, I'm pretty bullish on seeing us get to that 50, 50 load per person output without, without dropping a lick of service. Right. And from that standpoint we were talking about 35. Right. That puts us at that billion dollar mark with seemingly right.

Peter Coratola [00:57:29]:
Maybe 10% or 20% of the, of the growth of human capital here. Right. Which in our industry would be complete outlier in terms of our revenue per load, how lean we run. Right. And I think because of that we'll be able to capture more market share because we will be able to truly pass those cost savings on to the customer. And that kind of goes hand in hand with what else I see. I think people that are capitalizing on this will have to make that conscious decision to pass this on to the companies that you're servicing. Right.

Peter Coratola [00:58:05]:
And the people that do that smart and do that quick and accept the relative AI, I think will be those companies like Ease and two years that are leading the industry.

Mark Kvamme [00:58:14]:
That's fantastic. Well, first of all, I want to thank you guys from the investors of the in the Ohio fund. You guys have increased their their value quite a bit. We thank you for what you're doing at ease and what you're doing at Jacob and and really look forward to doing a lot more in the future. So thank you for the time today and look forward to the next year ahead.

Peter Coratola [00:58:33]:
Likewise.

Andy Jenks [00:58:34]:
Thank you. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:35]:
All right, That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffreyofthelandfm or find us on Twitter oddleayofteland or SternFA. J E F E. If you or someone you know would make a good guess for for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on itunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:24]:
The Lay of the Land podcast was developed in collaboration with the UpCompany LLC at the time of this recording. Unless otherwise indicated, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the company which appear on this show. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next week.