Brittany Chisnell: Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar. My name is Brittany Chisnell with the FreightWaves media team, and I'm happy to present this webinar in partnership with Werner Enterprises. Today, we will discuss the power of technology, empowering shippers with visibility, safety, security, and self-service. I'm happy to be joined by Dara Mahon, CIO at Werner Enterprises, and Grace Sharkey, author and industry expert at FreightWaves. We will also have a Q&A following the discussion, so please make sure to have your questions ready for our presenters. Before we get started, I'd like to cover just a couple of housekeeping items. First, if you have any issues during the webinar, please feel free to access the help section or the audience chat function in your webinar console. If you have any questions that you'd like to ask our presenters, please enter those through the Q&A box in your console at any time during the presentation, and we will answer as many of those as possible during the audience Q&A following the discussion. We'll also be sending a link to the recording of this webinar tomorrow if you'd like to view it on demand or share it with your colleagues. At this point, I'll go ahead and turn it over to Grace to kick off today's discussion.
Grace Sharkey: Thank you. And thank you to everyone who's joining us in the audience today. If you know me, I'm a freight tech nerd. So I'm excited to not only have this discussion with you all, but of course, with Werner as well. And I want to introduce you, of course, their EVP and CIO, Dara Mahan. Dara, thank you so much for joining us. I'd love if you could maybe introduce your time here and your tenure in this industry and the work that you focus on at Werner.
Dara Mahon: Yeah, so delighted to be here. Yeah, my name is Dara Mann and I am the CIO at Werner. I think I've been at Werner four and a half years and I suppose technically I've been in the industry for that period of time. But I do have a little bit of history. Back in the mid-90s, I actually drove for a while. So I have a CDL. I still drive a little bit. So when I came to the United States first in the mid-90s, I drove for one of our competitors who I'm not allowed to mention ever in this building. Yeah. So I did that, and then I did spend some time loading, unloading trucks in the warehouses as I kind of grew into a technology role at a company called Sage Software. I managed the warehouse, sort of felt like, hey, this is very manual, so I kind of got into it. I'd always had an interest in technology, so I kind of got into the, hey, how can I make this more automated? How can I work a whole lot of machines? You know, a lot of ins and outs in the warehouse and how can I make it, you know, introduce a warehouse management system. So I did that, sort of got noticed by the IT team because I was working with them a lot, ended up in technology. Stayed at Sage almost 20 years and then got headhunted, went to a company called Vonage in the telecommunications and VoIP space, voice over IP space. And then about four and a half years ago, almost five, it'll be five years in June, which is kind of crazy to believe, came to Werner. And part of the idea of joining Werner was to sort of help modernize, not help, modernize the tech stack. So that's sort of the quick version of how I got here.
Grace Sharkey: Well, I love that, especially for our audience to get a good idea of where your viewpoint comes from. Right. And what's great about this is you've been quite literally have almost touched like every part of a supply chain down to right. Driving that truck to its end destination. So I think that. probably enables you to not only help build these tech stacks, but have an idea of full workflows and how everything works together as well. And I want to start this discussion with an overview of technology in particular. And from your point of view, how do you see technology transforming the work that supply chains are facing today?
Dara Mahon: Yeah, so I think, you know, I say this all the time and it's not meant to be in any way critical of the industry, maybe a little bit, but I do think that the industry at large needs to move on from on-prem, monolithic, ERP, TSM. I mean, all of those sort of supply chain management systems that are on-premise, transportation management systems that are on-premise and start to think more broadly about moving to the cloud. And I think a lot of A lot of companies our size and bigger or smaller are doing segments or pieces of their business in the cloud and still have the monolith sitting on-prem in their own data centers. And I think that's the first thing that technology can really help and is really starting to change the supply chain in that regard that people are moving to the cloud. And what I think happens when you move to the cloud almost natively is you just become more connected. And you have the ability, more importantly, to be more connected. So that introduces a whole raft of APIs. It introduces a whole raft of services that run in the cloud that you can just connect to. So I think, you know, when you look at what we're doing from a TMS perspective, we're using a company called Mastery. They're a product called Mastermind, relatively new in the space, but making a big bang already. And that just allows us to bring all of our freight into a single platform. And then we have complete visibility to that freight across the entire organization. And we're almost 70% of the journey, like moving from the Monolith to Mastermind, we're almost 70% of the way there. Expected to be finished by the end of this year. And already we're reaping the awards from the visibility that Mastermind is allowing us to have across the entire organization, all of our freight, all of our assets, all of our utility in a single platform. So I think the single biggest thing is moving to the cloud, giving access to API. And then, of course, everything then becomes real-time. You've got to make a whole lot of decisions an awful lot quicker than you have before. And then the ubiquitous AI, the thing that everybody's talking about. While it will work on the older platforms, it becomes so much easier when you're in cloud-connected, API-based platforms.
Grace Sharkey: Yeah, it's interesting. It's really almost touching on as well as the siloed data, I think, that we've seen in this industry that when you say you bring all that freight into one platform, right, you're getting a full picture of the data behind that freight as well, which I think allows you to do all sorts of things, whether that's just knowing where the shipment is, but, of course, using that for – future analytics and seeing exactly what would be best for your company overall, which I mean, over the past five years, I think we've seen the right, those silos start to break down and what you said, right? Getting everything on the cloud, everything in the right, in the same spot. So you can almost expand your tech stack off of that. And that venture in particular and the shippers specifically that you're talking to, what do you feel like is their biggest pain point when it comes to using technology for especially visibility and safety and even security now as well?
Dara Mahon: Yeah, I think it's a couple of things, right? First of all, and it sort of leads back to the first point, right? Too many disconnected services, too many disconnected applications. So again, running independently and because they're on-premise and because they're monolithic, it's very hard to move the data between the two of them in real time, right? You can do it, but it becomes a nightly batch job or a twice daily batch job, or even an hourly batch job in this day and age can just be not frequent enough. So I think just disconnected tools and systems is a problem. I think the other big problem with visibility, for example, and that's kind of what we're talking about here, is we are provided an awful lot of visibility that we take no action on. We have this idea of we need to track a truck load from origin to destination and every point, maybe every 15 minutes in between. And there are certainly loads that you want to do that on. But there's also an awful lot of loads that that data gets provided and nobody really cares until – like it's kind of at the end points of that journey and maybe even the midpoint that you want to know. Hey, did it leave on time or is it going to arrive on time? So I do think that there's an awful lot of useless data or unread data being provided or being consumed and not properly consumed. So I think – If you're going to get asked for visibility and we're going to provide visibility, and I mean this on the shipper side, the carrier side, the transportation provider like us, we've got to use that data and figure out what's the proper use of it and make use. And then I think, you know, we sort of – we kind of open ourself. I think exposure to fraud is a big pain point right now. And I think we expose ourselves an awful lot to that. We're kind of our own worst enemies in that regard by not using technology to shore up those fraud, those points where we can have fraud, where we can cause delays because of that fraud. So I think in general, for me, the pain point is around disconnected. This is why I'm such an advocate for APIs and for the cloud. Because you just become connected and you become real-time. And we don't really have that today.
Grace Sharkey: Yeah, you know, I always love to compare like technology we use in our everyday life to what we see in this industry. When you talk about these updates, like even you pointed out, an hourly update sometimes isn't enough, right? I mean, how upset would all this be?
Dara Mahon: Or at least we don't think it's enough, right? Right.
Grace Sharkey: Yeah. But like, how upset would we all be if we couldn't log into our bank account and know what we have in there right now? Right. And, and again, we're powering the best thing about supply chains is all the businesses and small businesses, right. That are a part of that. So it's the same exact thing. You want to know what's happening in your business now. And that means where's your product. right where's your truck if we're talking to carriers right all of that means something within the day so we'll get into actually think a number of those pain points as well but i want to start a little bit dive deeper into the visibility space in particular and when you're working with shippers and customers as well how do you see that real-time tracking providing a competitive edge for them
Dara Mahon: I mean, I think the obvious ones are, like, you really do, you know, if you have that real-time visibility, you can avoid all kinds of problems. You can just nip problems at the bud, right? So if I know, you know, 48 hours before a load's going to get delivered that it's already running two hours late, I mean, that's information that's very valuable to the shipper. It's very, you know, so now I can schedule or reschedule, you know, the labor needed unload or put that – put that freight away or cross-dock it and ship it somewhere else. So I think that's kind of the obvious ones. So you just get to respond. Before an issue becomes an issue, you already have a plan to mitigate whatever that problem is. And then all the other things that are on there, the missed appointment, right? So now I can give that appointment stop to somebody else. I can avoid a detention fee. I can be proactive about every problem like this. So that's the really good part about it. How it can, you know, just completely transform what happens at the end point versus what, you know, if I don't know and it shows up four hours late and I don't know until it's supposed to arrive that it's running four hours late. So I think that's the obvious one and the biggest one. Now, there are also, I think, all kinds of things in between. I mean, if we were to use all of this visibility properly, even for us as a carrier, we know where the truck is. Maybe we're going to change the fueling location based on the price if we know ahead of time that, hey, that price is lower or we're getting a better rate there. So I think there's all kinds of things that we can do if we use visibility correctly.
Grace Sharkey: Yeah. I always look at it as well too. It's like, I mean, a number of the things you just touched on, right. Eliminates waste in this industry too. And you brought up, right. If there's, if my, if your Werner truck is, isn't going to make it in that warehouse can put another truck in, we're getting more trucks on the road, which betters the market for all of us at the end of the day as well. And it's, that's my favorite part about supply chain in particular is it's very much like this caused that and this kind of effect of all of these different decisions affecting each other. And if we do have that real-time tracking, then we can not only help ourselves, but I think all of those that are involved with our ecosystem as well. So I think that's pretty interesting. And you touched on your fleet in particular, and I'm interested, how do you feel like you use... real-time visibility to optimize your overall fleet operations? And where have you seen improvement as well with those initiatives?
Dara Mahon: Yeah, I think in general, you know, for example, we have real-time visibility into hours of service, right? Mastermind displays that. We have real-time visibility into equipment status, and we use that. But then, you know, kind of getting back to the visibility we provide by just tracking the load, We have real-time visibility into departure times, you know, delays along the way. We have real-time visibility into, say, weather. Like we have now started to overlay weather maps on all of our routes, all of our, you know, so we know, you know, even like we geofence every weather alert we get from the National Weather Service. And we then contact all those drivers and say, hey, you're either headed into or you're about to be in or you're in somewhere with a severe weather. So if we're going to pull you over, which we do, we tend to ground the fleet in those situations.
Grace Sharkey: Yeah.
Dara Mahon: Now we know that, hey, this is going to continue for three hours or four hours or 12 hours. And we can start to, again, proactively react to all of the disruption that's going to cause a – and you can imagine – If we have to pull 100 trucks out and just put them on the side, you know, put them into a safe haven and they're not going to drive for 12 hours because of a weather issue, that causes ripple effects across our whole network. So then we can start to plan for that. So and we've been really successful in like, first of all, safety is the first thing we think about. And we are I think we're one of the few carriers that will just say, hey, that's not fair. But I mean, we do say ground the fleet, whoever's in that. Get to a safe haven and park and let's not, you know, let's not risk driving in snow or ice or wind or, you know, heavy tornado activity. Yeah. So what it allows us to do is really, really focus on safety first and then, okay, what are the repercussions of that action and how do we have to start to look at the ripple effects and how do we, again, go back and re-optimize the network because of this delay. Yeah.
Grace Sharkey: Yeah, and I'm sure running a fleet the size of Werner, you run into individual cases. I mean, using weather analytics, right, and knowing the weight of trucks and saying, hey, this wind speed you can drive through, but, hey, if you only have 5,000, 10,000 pounds on your back and that hefty wind happens all the time here in Michigan, right, comes through and you individually need to set aside, like that's – That's I think that real time aspect becomes very helpful. And I'm again for if there's any small fleets watching this to Werner, this is huge for those that could be smaller. I mean, can you imagine the the safety mechanisms or the the issues that you would have with your safety and service records not being able to make those choices? And so I'm sure that's a big part of what Werner's safety and analytics go into that as well.
Dara Mahon: You know, one of the things that attracted me to Werner during the interview process was the conversation around driver and around safety. And, you know, being the skeptic that I am and coming out of maybe the suffering, you kind of wonder, okay, is that really, is that lip service or is that what actually happens? But to me, it was really eye-opening that in every single conversation, driver's safety, they were the two things that everyone talked about before anything else. And then when I get here and you realize very, very quickly, it's not lip service at all. That is exactly the way this this operation works. We think about safety. We think about drivers. And as a result, we have to make tough decisions and tough decisions around, you know, how does that impact the network? And like when we like nobody stops to think twice about, hey, get those drivers off the road, get them to a safe haven for any reason. But when we do that, then we have to react. And that's what I hope, you know, that we're doing from a technology perspective. We're giving the operators the tools to be able to react to that.
Grace Sharkey: Well, and it's turning into predictive too, right? Like being able to already see that maybe that weather is happening. You're able to avoid situations as well. For the shippers that you work with, where have you seen the predictive analytics due to that real-time visibility improve their work too?
Dara Mahon: Yeah, and I think what you see from shippers – and we have some really, really, again, forward-looking and forward-using technology shippers who are using AI along with visibility, along with the analytics that you can get from that visibility. I think we're seeing – Like they can forecast better, for example, based on what we're telling them about how freight is moving around the country. They can avoid bottlenecks, capacity issues. It helps them get ahead of problems so that, again, if we're telling, like we said earlier, if we're telling them that, hey, we're going to be late or we've got 10 trucks that are running late because of a weather event or 100 trucks. So then they can put all of that into their analytic models and come up with, okay, what's the ripple effect on us? Like we have some big retailers where we go into distribution centers, we pick up a whole bunch of freight from the distribution centers, and we go out to individual stores. So it allows them to say, hey, again, staffing issues at stores. You don't need to be there at 4 a.m. to unload that truck because it's not coming too late. So I think we're seeing an awful lot of just, again, waste out of the system. And whether it's human resources waste or traffic waste, whatever the waste happens to be, because of all of this new technology, we're able to help get that waste out of the system and then make them more efficient, more productivity, better service to them, better service to their customers. So it just feels like we're at this moment where we're really, really making a difference in terms of tech and how that visibility that the tech provides impacts everybody.
Grace Sharkey: Definitely. We'll dive into some AI questions here for our audience. Remember, feel free.
Dara Mahon: We always get to AI.
Grace Sharkey: You know, you brought it up and I said, here we go. We're going to make that turn.
Dara Mahon: Every conversation.
Grace Sharkey: Right? For our audience, if you have any questions, be sure to add those. If for some reason there's a question we don't get to, we will get those to Werner so they can reach out to you directly as well. So make sure you do add those as we get into some fun tech terms here. Yes, AI. Dara, I'm sure you can't avoid the conversation. If I search my inbox right now for AI, the number of emails probably wouldn't change as I saw from the beginning. So let's dive into that in particular. And I'm very interested from your perspective based on your journey in this industry as well. Yes, we're seeing it all over the place. How is Werner leveraging AI in particular? Yeah.
Dara Mahon: So, you know, it's amazing how quickly we've adopted AI and how quickly the team have just embraced it and ran with it in so many areas. But, I mean, I think first and foremost around analytics, like working with a partner is mastermind. you know, in the mastermind platform and looking at how they're using AI and then how we can make the best possible use of that. And they're doing a fantastic job, just conversational AI on the platform to do searches, to tell it again, tell us what loads are late, tell us what loads are running early, tell us what drivers are out of hours. Like it's just cool that the stuff that's going on in that platform. So, so first and foremost, within the confines of the TMS, it just makes life so much easier for the, for the, for our users and for our operators. And my job is to make life easy. I hate it, but it's to make life easy for those operators. But they enjoy it. They enjoy the tech. And we're seeing those gains. But then we're using it across the board. For example, the big win for us and one of the biggest is conversational AI bots. And this to me is amazing. We've been tracking this for about 12 months now. And back in September, October, we were having conversations with all the players. There's plenty of them now about how can we start to use this. And then in January, we got serious. Okay, now we have platforms where we can just plug these in using APIs and using their tools, Twilio, et cetera. And in the space of about eight weeks, we've gone from zero calls to about 8,000 to 10,000 calls a week. And these are calls, like, they're just statusing calls to begin with, like, you know, calling drivers, carrier drivers looking, you know, not our own drivers because we know where they are, but calling carriers, like, on our brokerage side. Hey, what's your ETA? Are you on schedule, ahead of schedule, et cetera? But it's, you know, even we own a CDL school, Roadmaster, so calling students to remind them, hey, you've got to be, you know, where you've got to be at 9 o'clock Monday morning. You need to bring the following three things so that you can start your class. calling students who graduated to remind them of when their CDL test is. And just in a lot of cases, it's calls we just wouldn't necessarily have the time to make, or there's just too many of them for us to make, and then we're able to just turn bots on. But then we have all kinds of other ideas around maintenance, around inbound calls. We actually are taking some inbound calls now where the driver's calling in for maintenance help, and we can direct them to the right carrier service rep, or we can direct them to the right maintenance crew on the road. So all of those areas. But then you get to the data cloud, and that's where the really cool stuff has happened. So we use Snowflake as our data source, our data cloud. We'll recollect all of the data. And where we're starting to use it is, again, in the predictive analytics space, the self-service space. There's just so many uses for it in terms of analyzing data. By the way, I think the one thing where AI can really make a difference is the amount of data that everybody collects, not just transportation, but in corporate America, in universities, in hospitals, you name it. We collect so much data, and we only use 2%, 3%, 4% of it in the best cases. The rest of it just sits in databases. And there's so much rich, rich detail in that data that we never get to take advantage of. And that's where I think AI really comes into it. And that's where we're going to see the real ones.
Grace Sharkey: So it's very interesting to see it applied to, I think, logistics. It almost... Feels like it was, sorry to all the other industries maybe watching right now, but you all have supply chains too. And it feels like it's almost meant for this industry because the fun thing about logistics and supply chain, particularly transportation as well, is that it takes a lot of analytical thinking. I think thinking that takes a lot of individual minds in order to get that done. And I'm really excited to see how it's applied over the next couple of years and how, you know, real big differences we get to make as logistics providers and what we're giving to shippers than just a truck showing up on time, right? And I'm interested on the insights in particular. As you're pulling in, of course, Warner's and your shippers' data in particular, where have you seen insights from that improve shipper relationships as well?
Dara Mahon: So I think, you know, so some of that might be like secret sauce that I'm not overly willing to speak about because I think, you know, what we're doing – We're using – we're looking at – I think for the first time ever, the transportation industry can look at technology and data insights and analytics as a selling tool.
Grace Sharkey: Yeah.
Dara Mahon: And I mean – so that means that get in on the front end of the sales cycle. When this is just a raw opportunity and let's sit down and say, hey, not only can we move your freight, which Werner can do. I shouldn't say blindfolded, but we could do a blindfold except for the drivers. They couldn't be blindfolded. But Werner can move the freight, right? And we know how to do that. And that's what we're experts at. We're also experts at great customer service. That's what we're known for. I think that's our real secret sauce. Yeah. But then what we haven't always provided is we've got tech solutions for you that we've never had before. And not because we didn't want to have them before. We just didn't have the tech to do it. So now we have those tech solutions. And an awful lot of those tech solutions are around data insights, data analytics, and You know, visibility, all of those things that we can set up. You know, we can even set up now. We can show you what trailers are in your yard. Are they empty or full? If they're empty, you know, are they available? Are they in good maintenance condition? Are they waiting for a puncture repair? But if they're full, what freight's in them, if you don't already know? So, like, just simple stuff that seems simple like that to say, hey, in your 100-acre yard, you have 170 trailers from Werner and 69 of them or 70 of them are ready to load. But then we have all sorts of other things like geofencing that we can do automatic ETA. We don't even need to tell you. We don't need to make a phone call to say the driver's in your yard. We can tell you because he broke a geofence or she broke a geofence on the way in and now they're sitting waiting for it. I mean, I could go on, but there are just so many. And then just in general reporting around how many trucks, how many loads, what was late, what was on time. And it's real-time information. It's not the reports you get at the QBR or that we send you once a week anymore. You can look at how we're doing. You can look at how we are performing against the SLAs we committed to. And if we're not doing it, which, by the way, most of the time we are by a long way. But if we're not, you can pick up the phone and say, hey, what's going on? And we don't have to wait three more weeks till this is festered into a big problem. Or better yet, which is what we do, we proactively call you and say, hey, we missed the mark. And here's what we're going to do to fix it. So I think it's just in general what we can provide to the customer is so much more than we could even two or three years ago.
Grace Sharkey: I'm excited to see that you guys are at the forefront of that. And, you know, there's a lot of chatter around AI, how it's being used and deployed in this industry. For those that are watching or considering, you know, looking at AI tools, trying to figure out how maybe they can include that in their tech stack as well. What are maybe misconceptions about AI and transportation that you feel like this industry needs to overcome?
Dara Mahon: I think the first misconception about AI is it really isn't AI, right? True, true, true. I think 99% of what we use today is just very, very, very complicated and very advanced machine learning. Yeah. It literally is. We've got these large language models that are technically just, again, just relearning, relearning, and it's very advanced. So I think that's the first one. I think there's another misconception around it's replacing people. Like, I don't think that we ever get to the point where we replace people. I mean, that's not true. There are some things like the bot making phone calls. It can replace people, sure. But it's also helping us... You know, take those people, and this is the way we think about it, who are on the phone calling, looking for an ETA. So you don't need to do that anymore because the bot's going to do it. But I can put you on the phone and have you call a customer or a driver and have a more, you know, just a more meaningful interaction with that person.
Grace Sharkey: Definitely.
Dara Mahon: We have this industry at large is a huge retention problem, for example. Yep. With drivers. And part of that we know. You know, the part of that is because we don't connect as much as we could or should with the driver. So if we could take people off sort of, I don't want to say meaningless phone calls, but calls that aren't as important or aren't as impactful and then put them on calls that, you know, we pick up the phone, we call the driver and we say, hey, we see you had a bad day yesterday or how are things going for you today? Or you were out sick last week. How are things? How's your health? Like just more human type conversations that would, you know, help our drivers understand that we as a company really care about them. And we do. Um, so I think, you know, I think that's the type of thing that it's not going to replace people. It's just going to allow us to use those people to do better, smarter work where they can, they can have better conversations. They can do more analytical work, whatever it happens to be helps us make smarter decisions. I think that's the, to me, that's the biggest misconception about AI. It's not replacing people. It's just going to augment and help us do a better job of, of managing our, our workforce and managing our decisions.
Grace Sharkey: Yeah, we're in a service industry, right? And especially for the drivers that you're speaking of, they deal with the hardships of the road. I mean, hey, I've got a little road rage in me. Not me. Right? Not you, but I'm not going to lie. Someone cuts me off, it makes me upset. And so I can't imagine... doing that every single day over the road through different states and different populations. And then to get the one phone call from my employer and have it be negative, it just doesn't add to it, right? And I totally agree. I think what's great about AI and why I get excited for its future in this industry in particular is because most of us are maneuvering or solving problems Really hard situations, upsetting situations, things aren't getting to a place where things have to go somewhere and have a specific timeline. So to get that kind of stress off your back and write that opportunity to be to have your job almost a little bit more. I don't want to say meaningful, but meaningful. To have that relationship, that interaction, that human interaction to add to your job.
Dara Mahon: I think meaningful. And that's not meant to insult the job that people do. But it's more meaningful. We all have parts of our day which feel monotonous, mundane. I got to get this done. I hate doing it, but I got to go do it. If you can have AI handle that part of your day or some of that part of your day for you, it does open you to do things that may be meaningful to you, not even to the company, but just more meaningful to you because I go do something I enjoy doing more or I do something that has a bigger or better impact on somebody else. So I think in that sense, it can be more meaningful and it can really make your day a little bit easier. Sorry about that. I also, you know, the one thing I had this really, I read this really interesting article a year back, but it's about even from the time. So every single technology that's ever arrived, people, the doomsayer say it's the end of the world. It's the end of employment. We're not going to have jobs. And this really interesting part was when pen and paper or quill and paper was first introduced in Puritan English schools. So the Puritans who were, you know, very conservative religious people, those people felt like, If we allow students, our kids, to write stuff down, their memories will just stop working. So if they can read everything, they won't need to remember anything. If they can write it down, they won't need to remember it. So their brains will suffer for it. And, of course, that didn't happen. And then you move your way all the way through history, every single technology advent from the piece of paper and the quill to the trashing machine to what happened with airplanes to all of these things that happened, the Industrial Revolution, And all the way back to the internet in the 1990s, people felt like technology is going to take jobs. And what's happened like the last four years, if you average the last four years, we've had higher unemployment in the United States than we've had at any other period in our history. So I think we tend to catastrophize and doomsay every piece of technology, which as a technologist, I hate to see. So I think that reassuring power for people is AI is not going to take a job.
Grace Sharkey: No, I agree with you there. And if anything, you know, I'd love to, you touched on this a little bit, but I'm interested in the safety aspect, right? We're talking about the driver behavior. I think, hey, AI is not going to take your job. And I think a big part of this too, is it's going to say it. hopefully save lives. And, and, and I would assume even the mechanic side of things, right? Like the uptime on trucks as well. Can you speak on, on that as well?
Dara Mahon: I mean, I think just in general terms on the truck, right? So another thing that Werner does and we do all the time is like when we buy a truck, whatever the latest safety features are, you know, collision mitigation, forward facing cameras, you know, Automatic braking, whatever the latest is, and it's been tried and trusted, and it's past whatever safety case in the past, we put that on the truck. So I think that's technology, and there's a large amount of AI influence on that technology. So I feel like just that in and of itself. And then what we're doing with that technology is we're collecting a whole bunch of data around harsh braking, around sudden swerving, anything that we can determine from the driving pattern. that we should talk to that driver about and we should give them coaching. And we use AI to analyze that. And we're using – we use Samsara for our forward-facing cameras. And that company, again, I like giving shout-outs to good partners. They're a great partner. They've helped us tremendously through, first of all, the implementation of that technology, but then secondly, how we use that technology and how we use the data and video we glean from that technology. And they've built a bunch of AI around how we can highlight the ones that we really should, A – you know, call to coach, but B, it's also called to say, good job. Like, you know, we have plenty of video of drivers doing a really good job and being very, very safe. And we need to call that out just as much, if not more than the drivers who need coaching. So we do both of those things very well. And I think that's, First and foremost, that's important. Then we get that real-time feedback, the self-coaching, self-correction. So drivers take that seriously. So, for example, when a driver is following too close to the vehicle in front of them, we have a voice in the truck that says, hey, you're following too close. It leads to a self-correction. They automatically slow down a little bit and increase that following distance. So that's the type of stuff that we're doing with technology. But then we're taking all of the data that we then collect from all of that. And this is what I mean by that. And we put it in Selflake. And then we do analysis. And we try to recognize trends in the data that says, hey, when a driver has this amount of time, this amount of hours of service, what is in that data? what's in that data that says this is typically when drivers get tired, this is typically when drivers may get a little bit careless. And we're trying to use that data to just improve coaching, improve driver behavior across the board. And then there's just a ton of other stuff that we're doing, you know, side facing cameras, rear facing, side facing cameras. How do we use that data? I mean, the, The data that we get from cameras is just amazing. That video in and of itself, I mean, just from an insurance standpoint, it helps us, you know, protect the driver really. Right. I mean, we, we obviously want to protect the motoring public as well, but there is, you know, before the advent of cameras, every accident was the 18 wheelers fault, right. Automatically or very close to automatically. Now we actually have data and video to prove that it wasn't. And that's, that's, you know, in and of itself, that's just a huge win for the driver for safety and for us as a company.
Grace Sharkey: Definitely. I like that Samsara shout-out as well. I got a chance to go to one of their – Fantastic company, yeah. Yeah, and I got to see that same technology and work, and it's fascinating. I think it is – to touch on showcasing the positives as well, right, that drivers are doing I think is a big part of the work that they do.
Dara Mahon: You know, and I just, if you don't mind, like a minute, just give a shout out to great partners. Like we have fantastic partners. Samsara is one. Salesforce is another. Workday is another. And then Mastermind, you know, relatively the newest probably of the bunch. I think they actually celebrated the five-year anniversary a week or two ago. And I think, you know, if anyone's looking for TMS, that's the way to go. If you're looking for CRM, Salesforce is the way to go. If you're looking for a HRMS and a back office system for truckers, That's the way to go. Workday is the way to go. And then I, I, Sam, Sarah, just great company as well. So we have got great technology partners, which means, and I mean, partners, they're not vendors. They're not people who sell us stuff. They actually work with us day in day out to make us better and make the industry better.
Grace Sharkey: You know, this is a, for the audience out there, feel free to add your questions. This is one that they had placed in there and it's perfect timing. You've talked about partnerships and, I'd love for you to define that. For those watching today that are starting to have those conversations, when in those early conversations did you know this is going to be, this is a sign to a good partnership and maybe this is someone we should hold off on?
Dara Mahon: Yes. Look, again, I've been 20 plus years as a buyer of technology, right, in some form or another. And what I've learned over those years is that it's not enough to just buy the software or buy the software as a service or buy the hardware. you've got to buy the partnership. And I mean that in the best possible way. It's very hard to know in the sales cycle if this is going to be a good partner. So you've got to do a lot of research. I mean, luckily, I've got a good peer network of people I can call and say, what do you think of this company? Have you worked with them before? But once you get to the point where you've bought, you've signed up, and you've signed the contract, and now you're locked in for a period of time, I think Too many times we as customers sort of expect that the partnership is all going to happen on that side. They're going to do everything for us and nothing in return except our money. And I feel like that's the bad attitude to have. I love to have a partnership where it's a two-way street. And by that I mean... sure, they help us with technical issues, but I've also known, you know, our engineers get on the phone with a partner, with one of our vendors, and help them with a technical issue. I also say, like, I'm glad to do Just get involved in their sales cycle, right? So do reference calls for them. Again, prove to me that you're a good partner. Prove to me that you do what you said you were going to do in the sales cycle. And then I will go back and tell the next customer, hey, what they said they really meant. You know, I'll go to conferences. I'll get on panels with them. We'll talk through product issues. We'll talk through pricing. I mean, I have a call on Monday. or Tuesday of next week with a vendor who doesn't know how to price a solution. And they're coming to ask for, hey, what would you pay? How would you pay? So it's about that. And that's another reason why I love the startup community is when you get in with the startup community and you can help them to build and you can have influence on their product, it forms a partnership. and then you know not only do you keep that partnership at the company level but individually like i go from company to company and i will bring that partnership with me like warner's is my last i'm convinced of that one because i'm staying here i enjoy it so much but i have brought a whole bunch of those partnerships with me from previous jobs where i can now say hey salesforce for example hey workday for example um let's sit down here and work this one through and i think partnership is really important and Like, it's just amazing if you treat it that way that it's not me who's going to get everything out of this relationship. I'm going to give as much as I get. I guess just like any, you know, relationship, personal or otherwise, you will get so much more out of it than if you approach it that way. And then when it becomes a true partnership, you stop thinking about it as us and them and you just think about it as us. And it's just magic happens and it really does. And I don't, that sounds cliche, but it really does happen.
Grace Sharkey: I definitely, I see it even more so happening now, right? Especially on the point that you brought up at the very beginning, right? That this industry seems to be moving a little bit off of like these legacy TMS systems that do everything I asked for and more almost like they aren't open sourced yet. I do have some buddies that are trying to look into it, but like more of these open source concepts and being able to like create a tech stack and, and just like you to talk about relationships, just like, you know, you have a relationship with your spouse. You wouldn't want your spouse to, to hate your best friend, right? You have to, You know, I see those different companies and those different technologies communicate together. And I feel like I'm seeing the technologies themselves, the entrepreneurs, the startups starting to realize that and realize that that's the game changer on their end, too. So, yeah, for everyone watching, figure out how to build a tech stack. Of course, talk to your peers and ask those questions, right, of what other technologies they work with, what partnerships they work with. So when you are ready maybe to stack on something new to your tech stack, you almost have those conversations.
Dara Mahon: And I think don't be so price-focused, right, because I think we all want to buy at the lowest cost, but you need to get the best deal, and it needs to be the right deal for both parties. Yeah. And then even through the sales cycle, you're forming the partnership. And if you beat the hell out of a vendor on price and you get the lowest price possible, well, they're a little bit pissed off at you already. Yeah. And then that reflects in the service you get. And so whereas if you settle for a better price, I guarantee you that whatever you spent extra is going to come back to you in spades because they'll have a better feeling about the relationship and they will give you more time, more support, more help, more technology.
Grace Sharkey: Definitely. And great question for our audience. Keep asking those again. If we don't get to it, we'll get to give those to Werner to follow up with you as well. Now, one other area I wanted to talk about, and we're seeing more of this chatter too, of the self-service technologies in particular. And for maybe our audience that might not understand exactly what that means. Dara, could you explain that and how Werner, it looks at self-service tech in its stack as well?
Dara Mahon: Yeah, and I talked about it a little bit, like now that we have technology that we can inject into the sales cycle and help the sales cycle, but show customers what we can give to them. And a lot of what we can give to them is just self-service in terms of reporting, in terms of visibility. And again, the fact that we're largely on a cloud platform now, we have API connectivity, our customers can consume that API. So we can say to them, hey, you want to see that yard freight, what trucks are in your yard, what trailers are in your yard, we can just give you visibility of that. It means you don't need to call us, we can give it to you. We can give you reporting capability. We can give you – like we can create a – for example, we can create a shard or a section. One of the great things is like for Snowflake, and I'll give them a shout-out. I've been a great partner too. Snowflake have this concept of shared databases, shared data stores. So with Mastermind, for example, is probably the best example. Mastermind uses Snowflake. We use Snowflake. They can put their data in our shared database or our shared data store, and we can see it immediately. So we can do the same thing with customers. We haven't actually done that yet, but we're working with one customer on it. So it's just all – and then once they have access to that data store, then they can do what they want from a reporting standpoint and be totally self-service on it. So it's those little things which, you know, don't take an awful lot of effort, really, but have a massive impact because now the customer doesn't need to call us anymore and wait for us to run a report. We can just say, hey, here you go, run the report. Or, hey, there's a visible, you know, here's a satellite image of your yard and here's where all the trailers are in.
Grace Sharkey: Yeah, I think it's fascinating to see this working its way, I think, more into the shipper side as well, of how they interact with their logistics providers. And I'm sure it's interesting, like you talk about the conversation AI, right? And I almost wonder how much of those conversations, those calls, how necessary they'll be over time with the ability for shippers just to pull up and know right when when something is happening so it's just interesting to see like how maybe we'll see it changes and and what technology we're using more today compared to others as as this technology gets smarter i think over time right
Dara Mahon: Yeah, I think conversational AI is a great example. I mean, if you look at it even last summer, you could listen to one of those bots and you could tell it was a bot and it was slow and it was clunky and it lagged. And it may not understand properly and it may answer the wrong question. And today, I mean, I think I could put you on what any one of the bots were running from three different companies and you cannot tell you're talking to a human. Now, we tell people. You're talking to a bot just because we feel like we should. But I don't think if you didn't know that, I don't know that you would not know for most of that conversation that you were not talking to a human. So it's just amazing. And then I also say this, like, you know, one of the companies we're using, Maneva, They're local here to Omaha. They're a startup, which again, I love. But their first generation seven weeks ago voice sounded like a bot. The one today doesn't sound anything like a bot. So in seven weeks, they've gone from being a little bit wooden to being very, very natural. So I think, again, there's an example of – Monive is an example of a great partnership with a founder here in Omaha, someone we knew very well, Marina Brown. And what we did with Marina was we just – we worked through several issues with her, but that company has just – I mean I think they made the most calls for us last week, probably 3,000 or 4,000. So it's cool. Happy Robot, another good one. I'm giving shout-out to these companies who are at Vuma. Like all of these companies are doing really, really good work for us. All startups, all founders, all need your business. So give them a call.
Grace Sharkey: A referral is the best compliment I think that anyone can receive, right? I used to have that at the end of my email back in my brokerage days. Let's see. Let's look ahead because we talked about some cool tech already. And being a technologist yourself, I'm sure you kind of nerd out seeing exactly what could be around the corner. What emerging tech should shippers get excited and be prepared for?
Dara Mahon: So, I mean, I think it's obvious that whatever AI is doing, keep an eye on it, right? I mean, there's all of this automation that AI can do. There's all this real-time. If you think about real-time exception handling, we tend to think about the exception as a thing that we have to go spend a lot of time on. And I think if we just flip it on its head and say, okay, let's start using AI to handle some of the exceptions that are, again, more mundane in nature, but right now we think about, okay, we'll solve 80% of the problem with AI and then 20% of the exceptions and we'll deal with them. But if you think about it, that 20% of the exceptions or 30% or 40% of the exceptions are very, very easy to automate, to fix for those, we could do that. So things like that, that AI can really help. I think we're going to see better predictive pricing. I think that's really important because this industry spends an inordinate amount of time on pricing. And it should because it's very complex. But I do think that technology, again, in the AI space is going to make pricing easier. And it's not just, it won't just be universal industry pricing. It will be pricing that's unique to the product that you offer.
Grace Sharkey: Yeah.
Dara Mahon: Right. So I think it's really important to make that distinction. So everyone has a slight, even in a brokerage, you know, we have different ways of offering our product and unique pricing to that offering will be really, really important. So you combine the pricing with the service, with the equipment, with the, you know, with the partnership, that's the pricing that we're going to be talking about. I think you're also looking at just the whole API ecosystem. I think APIs are extremely easy today. They're going to get easier in the future. Think about, again, and I know I'm talking about AI on every instance, but AI, maybe start to do the plumbing of your API. So we use artificial intelligence. We use something like a co-pilot that will then go out, take your API, and just plumb it for you. And then all of a sudden, you're up and running in seconds versus hours, days, or weeks. So I think all of that is really important. But then I think... When we start to think about visibility the right way, given all of the tools we have around visibility, what we can do with visibility in terms of optimization. And I mean, this has obviously an impact on the customer, but how we can optimize our networks, how we can make better use of interchanges, how we can make better use of net ops, how we can make better use of making sure that the right truck's in the right place at the right time with a driver and a trailer, whatever needs to be there. I think that will have massive impact on just our sustainability. It will have massive impact on the efficiency of the operation. And then as a result on the margin and the way that we price, you know, so I think it just has a huge impact across the board.
Grace Sharkey: Definitely. If there's leaders watching today that are trying to figure out how to build their tech stack for the future, right? Always future-proof their operations. What advice would you give them?
Dara Mahon: Well, if I knew how to future-proof it, I'd do it and I wouldn't tell anybody. So, you know, building a tech stack is hard work, right? Modernizing a tech stack is hard work. And I don't mean to say I work hard. There's a bunch of people in this organization who work really hard at it. I think it takes a lot of... A lot of courage, right? Like you got to have, you got to have a vision. You got to have a strategy and you just got to go do it. I think we spend way too much time planning. And this has got, I'm going to speak out of both sides of my mouth for a minute. Like the amount of time that tech people waste planning drives me crazy. Like we will sit in a room and we'll talk for eight hours about something. And if we just went and did it, we'd be done in two. And again, I'm exaggerating for effect, but that could be the reality of it. Yeah. And I think so we tend to plan so far in advance, 10 weeks out, 12 weeks out, three months out. Well, 12 weeks is three months, but six months out, a year out. And the truth of the matter is when we get six months out, the plan that we came up with is not going to be valid anymore. It's not what the business wants or the technology has changed. So in my mind, what you've got to do in terms of planning is you've got to have a North Star, right? That's where I'm headed. And if I can get everybody headed in that direction, and then let's focus on what we're going to do in the immediate future. Let's plan or think about that really well and be really certain about that. In the next 8 to 10 or 12 weeks, here's what we're doing. And then anything beyond that's a bit more fuzzy. And the further out you get, the fuzzier it is. But you still have the North Star as your goal. This is where I'm headed. And then... Because technology changes so quick, because business needs change so quick, that allows you to, okay, I was fuzzy. I knew I needed a pricing tool. I didn't pick the tool and I didn't pick the technology. I just knew I needed one. So now I'm at the point where I got to pick it and I can go look at what is the most advantageous pricing tool at that point in time. Not the one from six months ago or two years ago. The one that's readily available right now. So I think less time on planning, more time on execution. That to me is the most critical thing. But then beyond that, it's just that you have to get the whole organization on board. And again, I'm lucky because I have a whole bunch of peers in the C-suite who care about what we're doing and want to do it the right way. And I've got a boss and a board who are so supportive because they get out there and they tell the entire organization over and over again, this is the right thing to do. And when you say that enough times and then the organization starts to see the benefit of that tech stack upgrade or modernization, They understand and they believe, and then it becomes a little bit easier week over week over week. So here I am four years into this journey with Werner, and I've gotten that support, and we have this great organization. I can't speak highly enough about the operators, the finance, the legal, the accountants. Those people have all embraced what we're doing. They didn't necessarily at the beginning. But they've gotten there. And now they're all in. They're all working. They're all pulling their weight. They're all excited about the change we're making. So it just becomes a very cultural thing. Just do it bit by bit. Only bite off what you can chew at any given point in time. Don't plan too far out. Don't buy technology too far out. And just do it in incremental improvements. And you'll get there.
Grace Sharkey: Love it. And I think as we wrap this up here, a good question to leave is what's one takeaway you'd like attendees to know about Werner or even the future of tech at Werner as well?
Dara Mahon: So I think there's so many takeaways I'd love you guys to hear about Werner. But I think, I mean, I'm going to leave tech out of it. Like this is a customer-focused company. We think about the customer all the time. We think about drivers all the time. We think about safety all the time. And I think at our core, we're a service organization, and that's what drives us to be as good as we are. So I think anyone listening to us out there, if you're looking for a job, come talk to Werner. If you need someone to move your freight, come talk to Werner because we do it better than anybody else in the industry. And I think finally, if you just want to look at a company that's transforming in terms of tech in the transportation space, but not just there. I mean, we're doing stuff that nobody else is doing. Just look at what we're doing. Keep an eye on us because we're getting better all the time.
Grace Sharkey: I love it. Werner's one to watch. Thank you, Dara. Brittany, I'll let you wrap this thing up for us.
Brittany Chisnell: Excellent. Thank you guys for joining us today. That is all the time we have. I did want to remind everyone that any questions we did not get to, Werner will receive those and we'll reach out as they can. A big thank you to Dara and Grace for sharing your insights with us today. As a reminder, the recording of this webinar will be sent to everyone tomorrow via the email you use to register with. We hope you guys will join us again next time. Thank you.
Dara Mahon: Right. Thank you, guys.
