Supply Chain Trends in 2025 With Chris Caplice From MIT and DAT Freight & Analytics - Ep. 50
In This Episode
Last January, Chris Caplice joined us to discuss the top supply chain trends of 2024. This year, he’s back to talk about what the world of shipping and logistics will look like in 2025.
As executive director at MIT Center for Transportation Logistics and chief scientist at DAT Freight and Analytics, Chris is deeply immersed in the supply chain industry, and he shares some great insights about trucking, tariffs, and more.
Listen to learn what you should expect from the new year—and most importantly, how your business can prepare.
Trend #1: The truckload market will enter an inflationary period
Chris explains that since the late 1990s, “the truckload market has been on a series of cycles. … Capacity is tight and prices go up. Demand exceeds supply. And then it crashes back down and the opposite happens.”
Going into 2025, Chris anticipates that the market will again enter an inflationary period—one where shippers have less leverage. He advises businesses to “fix your roof before it starts raining.”
Trend #2: Global conflicts will continue—but supply chains will remain resilient
Despite ongoing crises, Chris is optimistic about the global supply chain’s ability to adapt and continue to function. “Global supply chains are so dynamic and flexible. … It's similar when there's a natural disaster, like a hurricane. There's always a sharp shock, but it's usually bounded geographically and temporally because the system recovers. We're very good at self-healing.”
Trend #3: Businesses will try to stay ahead of tariffs
What about tariffs? Here’s what Chris has to say: “Tariffs will probably have a big impact. We'll see how that plays out because you don't know what Trump says and what Trump will do, what'll actually get through the Senate. But if tariffs really do increase dramatically I don't think it'll change demand that much—maybe slightly. It might change how things enter the country … but I don't know how dramatically it'll shift the overall shipping patterns.”
In the meantime, many businesses have already begun importing more inventory than usual in an attempt to stay ahead of tariffs. “You hear the stories of especially small shippers bringing in a lot now just to stock up for the year. So we're going to see a lot of heavy inventory costs.”
Links
Transcript
Lori Boyer 00:00
Welcome back to Unboxing Logistics. I'm your host, Lori Boyer of EasyPost, and I am beyond thrilled and excited and I know you as our community out there are as well because today's guest was our most popular guest of 2024, had amazing insights from Chris Caplice sharing about thoughts of what was going to happen in 2024.
And so we've invited him back for 2025, you're going to be very excited to hear in order to tell us kind of his thoughts on maybe what happened last year and what's going on in the, in the upcoming year. Chris, can you introduce yourself to our guests who might not know you?
Chris Caplice 00:42
Sure. Thanks, Lori. I'm glad to be back. My name is Chris Caplice. I'm the two roles mainly. I'm at MIT Center for Transportation Logistics, where I'm the executive director of that center when I also created a lab up there called Freight Lab that looks at all things transportation. And I'm also the chief scientist at DAT Freight and Analytics.
I was part of the Chainalytics side of a company that was acquired about gosh almost five years ago now by DAT. So I have two, wear two hats, but they overlap quite a bit.
Lori Boyer 01:13
That's amazing. I love it. So one thing we're doing in this season, Chris, is I am asking everybody to share somebody or some role in the industry that you particularly admire and sharing why.
Chris Caplice 01:26
I actually have two.
Lori Boyer 01:28
Great.
Chris Caplice 01:28
So yeah, the, the first one is a guy named Woody Richardson. He recently retired from Schneider. And he was there for his whole career, 30 plus years. And what I love about what Woody did is when he retired, he wrote a book. It's a Road Less Traveled. It's all about truckload transportation and procurement.
Hopefully we can link to it in the credits of the, of this podcast. But he's he's done some great stuff. He's seen it all from a carrier side, and he took the time in retirement to write about it. And it's really worth reading. The other one is similarly got him Rob Haddock. Who just retired from Coca Cola for 40 years.
And he did the exact same thing. You know, he wrote a book and it's called Adventures of a Food Shipper. And it talks about do's and don'ts. And it's, what I love about it, both these guys, Rob and Woody, they had their careers and they were doing great stuff, but they took the time afterwards to write it up and publish books that can be used to help people go forward to get educated.
So those are guys that I admire. Cause it's not a, it's a non trivial task to write a book and publish it, especially when no one's pressuring you to do it.
Lori Boyer 02:35
Absolutely. And I love that whole idea of those in the ind- who have been in the industry for a long time, have so much freaking knowledge and information that the rest of us can learn from. Even if we have been in the industry 20, 30 years, you know, there's different aspects and that's amazing.
Chris Caplice 02:54
Yeah. They they're definitely thought leaders while they're in the industry. And now they kind of capstone that and captured everything. So it was great. Those are the two guys.
Lori Boyer 03:02
That's perfect. Awesome We got a couple of book recommendations for our audience as well. So that is fantastic. That kind of draws me into our next segment. AI is a giant topic, obviously. We can't go anywhere in this industry without hearing about it constantly, you know, bombarded. And so this season, we're doing a fun little segment where we're kind of asking experts to help us do a little reality check on AI.
AI is fun, and AI is great, especially ChatGPT, but, you know, you learn when you're an expert where it's got some holes, and where it might be right, where it might be wrong. So, I've asked it, Chris, I'm gonna pull it up, what ChatGPT anticipates or predicts will be the biggest trends in the logistics and freight industry in 2025?
So, and I'm gonna toss them at you, and see what you think. So, number one, it said that we'll see an increase in use of regional fulfillment and carrier diversification.
Chris Caplice 04:01
So, regional, regional distribution center, sure, that's, that's been increasing since ecommerce to get faster speed. Carrier diversification, I don't know exactly what they mean there.
Lori Boyer 04:11
I think adding a lot of the, like, alternative carriers, regional carriers, last mile carrier, going away maybe from the big four.
Chris Caplice 04:19
When you say the big five, we're talking parcel here.
Lori Boyer 04:21
Yeah, parcel in this case.
Chris Caplice 04:22
Sure, sure, they're gonna, there's more of that going on, there's more players out there. To include Amazon, if you count Amazon as certainly in the big five. Yeah, sure. Okay. I wouldn't call that the leading trend. That's kind of like, I wouldn't have either. I thought that was kind of crazy. It listed number one. Number two, it said the use of automation to address the labor challenges in the industry.
Well, that's not new, that's been going on forever. And so, I mean, you've seen it if you go to a McDonald's, right?
Because of even, you don't need high tech labor, just reducing labor. So we're seeing automation of things coming in everywhere. And robotics is getting really more advanced. So I think we're finding this and we're, I think we're starting to hit the levels like what Europe has, where Europe has a tighter space and things like that.
So we have to have automation similar to that. And I think we'll have more automation in the DCs and things like that. I don't see automation happening in trucking anytime soon. I know a lot of people are, they're piloting it in Arizona and Texas, but I just don't see that. But robotics definitely happening in automation of tasks is happening a lot now.
That's where one of the big promises of AI, generative AI, because we should talk about what is AI and what is not AI. There's a lot of fake AI out there, where it's really operations research, machine learning. So if we talk, when I say AI, I mean, large language models, generative AI, kind of as, as its own category.
They're all great tools, but I, that's what we really mean by AI, in my opinion.
Lori Boyer 05:57
Okay. I, I love that. What are your thoughts on, you know, we've seen it with the port strikes and whatnot, an element of that was not wanting to have AI replace jobs.
Chris Caplice 06:08
Oh, it's not even that. No, no, no, no. They don't want any automation. They don't want technology.
They would like to have electricity turned off. It's ridiculous. So, you know, you can only, it's, it's so strange because there's only, these organizations have monopolies. They have a monopoly on the East Coast and Gulf, and on the West Coast. And so, the idea of having a non union port is next to impossible.
But keeping technology out, advancement, is just so short sighted. It's just protecting, protecting jobs. And I understand that's a lot of what the union is there for, but it's, it's, yeah, it's not sustainable. You can't stop the tide of progress.
Lori Boyer 06:49
I was so shocked when I saw that that was a big element of it, because I thought, oh my goodness, that, we can't, exactly what you said. We can't stop progress. We, every other country's using it, you know, automation's here. We need to learn how to work with it. So.
Chris Caplice 07:01
Yeah, it's tough because there's, there's no competition. There's no competition to the port. I mean, if they have a monopoly on all those ports, it's, it's tough. Even Canada can't go around it. So we'll see.
Lori Boyer 07:13
So that'll be interesting as it, as things.
Chris Caplice 07:15
Was that one of the ones that they recommended?
Lori Boyer 07:17
It said that automation would continue to be advanced to address labor issues.
Chris Caplice 07:23
Sure, sure.
Lori Boyer 07:25
And then the last one, sustainability will grow as a competitive advantage for companies.
Chris Caplice 07:30
You know, it's funny because things have changed.
The big change. DEI and ESG is kind of a on the downward cycle. It kind of peaked about two years ago, but my opinion, and this might not be politically correct, but a lot of the social and governance things were piggybacking off of environmental sustainability and, and, and everyone can look at environmental sustainability as a positive.
No one wants to be, increase their emissions. There's so many ways to, to improve things. You don't have to have a hundred percent EV policy, which is kind of stupid. You should look for other solutions. But I think sustainability is becoming more important because a lot of these zero emission or minimized emission standards that CEOs promised are going to start coming due.
So I think it is, and the challenge is the scope three emissions. And this is where you know, they're not the missions that you control. It's your vendor somewhere in your supply chain. So for shippers, these are your carriers, your for hire carriers. They have to be able to give that to you. And if you use brokers, it's two levels. So I think there is a huge opportunity to capture and measure this better. And I, whether will it be a competitive advantage for carriers? Maybe, maybe, but at all, but the, the happy coincidence in trucking certainly is the less fuel you use, the more efficient you are, you create less emissions.
So the larger carriers that have newer equipment are doing a fraction of the emissions of the older equipment. And so there's a, there's a interesting challenge in that a lot of the pushes on you know, reducing the amount of emissions like what California is doing. But they're ignoring, they're waving the smaller carriers, which is where 90 percent of the problem is, because they tend to have older equipment.
So it's one of these policies. It's a political solution. And it's really not hitting the heart of the matter. But that's a long, long winded reply to your idea. I do think sustainability is coming, becoming more important. Will it become a competitive advantage for carriers? I don't know, maybe for brokers, if they can actually help a shipper achieve those goals, maybe.
Lori Boyer 09:39
I'm going to say that one of the great things with sustainability is that if you can do it right, it creates efficiencies for you as a business as well.
And then it's a win win for everyone. Yeah. One of the little sub points I had under sustainability was that it thought adoption of EVs for last mile delivery would accelerate.
Chris Caplice 09:56
I think that's, it's already happened. It's already happened. Yeah, yeah, it's easy. So if you think of EVs and AVs, right?
Electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles. EVs need to have a certain circadian rhythm. They need to, they can't go that far. Their range is limited. And this, this fits last mile delivery. Frito and Pepsi, I'd have this for their direct store delivery stuff. It's, it's perfect. And drivers love electric vehicles because they're quiet. They don't create a lot of pollution, they're, they're easy to operate. The acceleration is awesome. And so seeing it for that last mile delivery makes a ton of sense. You won't see it as much in the line hall point to point. Because that's, you know, it's irregular. It's not going on the same route.
There's some trying to do it, but it'll take a longer time. You need a whole system to support that. And then if you look at AVs, it's just the opposite. Autonomous vehicles will happen point to point, like intermodal. It'll go terminal to terminal, hub to hub. You won't have an AV driving down in, in Boston city streets anytime soon.
Maybe these roto, robo taxis are fine, but they're tiny. They're not 53 foot trailers.
Lori Boyer 11:08
Have you seen one? I keep wanting to see one. I still haven't even seen one out in the wild.
Chris Caplice 11:12
I've been in one years ago, in San Francisco back when it was partly owned Uber Freight had some ties to Waymo, and they were ties to Otto, OTTO, so I've done that.
I've actually driven an autonomous Class 8 vehicle.
Lori Boyer 11:29
Oh, nice.
Chris Caplice 11:30
That was scary.
Lori Boyer 11:32
I was going to say.
Chris Caplice 11:32
But you know, when the weather's nice, the road's pretty straight and traffic, it's pretty good. It's just when those strange things happen.
Lori Boyer 11:40
So AVs are probably much more likely out on the kind of more rural freeway roads, point to point.
Chris Caplice 11:45
Yeah, point to point. Nothing soon. Nothing soon. And it's going to be in the south, southwest. Where the weather's nice, the topography is nice, and the regulatory environment is friendly.
Lori Boyer 11:55
Oh, love it. Okay. So those were its top three. All right, I'll say them again.
Chris Caplice 12:00
It missed them. It missed the biggest one.
Lori Boyer 12:02
Okay good. I was gonna say so give me the grade. You're gonna give it an F then.
Chris Caplice 12:06
Oh, oh, no. No, I wouldn't give it an F. But they missed they missed all the large macroeconomic factors that drive supply, just like tariffs.
Lori Boyer 12:15
Okay, so you tell me, what are your biggest, tariffs? I agree.
Chris Caplice 12:18
These are ones that'll have the biggest impact. The tariffs and then, boy, the global conflicts right now with Syria devolving over the weekend.
Lori Boyer 12:29
I know.
Chris Caplice 12:29
And gone. There's such a vacuum here. So that's, there's a lot of, supply chain disruptions. I mean, that could be massive. I agree. Okay. So give it a grade A to F.
I think it's a gentleman's B.
Lori Boyer 12:43
A gentleman's B. That was, I think that was nice of you, generous of you. Okay, we'll give it, it had some good issues, but I agree with you. Biggest issues coming down.
Chris Caplice 12:53
But it's all about how you prompt. You gotta prompt it. And so there's an art to it. And to give generative AI, it has evolved so much in just the last couple years. It's kind of, it's such an interesting thing. And, and ChatGPT is one, but there's other ones out there that I do a better job at reducing the hallucination effect, which you're referring to. Like I always use Perplexity. Which I think is great, Perplexity, it it gives citations. And so I found it to be very helpful if I just wanted to get something. To me, it's like what Wikipedia is. It's great place to start, but you don't want to finish there, but it gets you going.
Lori Boyer 13:31
I find that with all of these, that they're a place to kick off, get ideas. And I love how you said it's about the way you prompt and it's about the way you refine things. So I always, for community out there, as you're listening and watching, if you're not familiar with things, start trying and playing with it because the more you do things, the more you get used to it and you can start to see, you know, how you need to refine.
Chris Caplice 13:56
Yeah, it's got, it will, Gemini will replace Google, right? I mean, the idea of going, doing a search, you get a bunch of links. And they're already putting it in there. They give the AI, they're answering the question and telling you where to look to answer it. It's just the natural progression.
Lori Boyer 14:12
Perfect. Okay. So what do you feel like, I guess, as we're going into this 2025, let's start, you mentioned tariffs, you mentioned goal global conflicts, you know, what are you anticipating how that could impact the industry?
Chris Caplice 14:28
I'll be, I'll start even more domestic. We are ending a four year cycle in the truckload market. Which the truckload market since late 1990s, early 2000s has been on a series of cycles, a tight market where capacity is tight and prices go up, right? Supply demand exceeds supply. And then it crashes back down and the opposite happens. And it usually is about a 36 to 42 month cycle. And this last one was 48, triggered by the pandemic.
But since 2022, it's, rates were in a free fall and have been underwater and they're just starting to come back up. So the thing that I'm seeing in 25, the big thing is that the next cycle is starting. So we're entering an inflationary market.
The cycles that a lot of times people new to the industry think the way that it is right now is the way it's going to stay. And it never does.
And so the truckload market's so big highly competitive. So many players that it's constantly cycling in and out as capacity enters and exits, and as it matches demand, so the cycles will continue. And so we're entering this inflationary cycle. And so shippers need to change their strategy accordingly.
You can't have the same strategy in an inflationary market as you have in a deflationary market. And so it's a time for them to reassess. That, to me, is the biggest focus for shippers, people who run transportation for the shippers. Get ready for an inflationary market where it's no longer a buyer's market.
It still is for a while, but now it's the time to fix your roof before it starts raining. And so you want to get that done and have it in place by the, say Q2, Q3, when the market tightens up again. And I don't think it's going to be like the pandemic cycle that just skyrockets up, it's kind of like a slow boil. But it is, it is going to start tightening up.
Lori Boyer 16:17
Okay. So would you recommend while rates are good right now that people try to lock in longer term rates, I guess, what, what do you recommend that they do to try to take advantage now while things are still a little soft?
Chris Caplice 16:29
So you can do a couple things. One is, you know, a pre award where you say, okay, carrier, you're on these lanes, these importantly, it's not just the run of the mill lanes, but the important ones.
Say I, instead of putting these out to bid and you might have the potential to lose them. Why don't we just say increase rates by I don't know, 1 percent 2 percent, do something, won't even put them out to bid. So it's a pre award. So what you do is you take things out when you're trying to take some of the risk off the table, right?
So that's one thing to do. Another is when you run a transportation bid, you always, you never take the low cost solution. No one takes a low cost solution. Because you'll end up with one carrier on all these, you know, carriers getting one lane or something. So you're always giving back. You're finding a business optimal.
And so when the market's tightening, you might want to give back a little more. So what you're doing is not squeezing it down as much, give a little more back, so your carriers are aligned and in place. The third is actually contracts. You might not want to go as long. So the question is, what, you know, what's going to, what's going to happen with these, with these, with these contracts. And see how long they're going to go for, but start putting in place like the mechanism for to do deal with dynamic rates for spot rates.
Everything can't be a contract. So you can kind of tie with that as well.
Lori Boyer 17:49
Okay. Those are all fantastic. So outside, so the number one thing you see happening inflationary, exactly. So shippers. That's you in my audience. Be aware. We've been taking advantage of all those really great rates and lots of capacity.
Chris Caplice 18:06
Yeah, but to be fair the 20 to 22 were just a nightmare for shippers where the rates went up so much. So it always comes back. The market always reverts. And so we're down, if you draw a straight line from like 2015, we're at about a three to three and a half percent compounded annual growth rate. But just the market swings go up and down around that.
But the general direction is in base inflation of about three and a half percent.
Lori Boyer 18:34
Okay, perfect. All right, so what would be the next thing then that you would say for 2025?
Chris Caplice 18:39
So tariffs will probably have a big impact. We'll see how that plays out because you can't, you don't know what Trump says and what Trump will do.
What'll actually get through the Senate. We'll see how that goes. But if tariffs really do increase dramatically I don't think it'll change demand that much, maybe slightly. It might change the how things enter the country. So that might ship some of the drayage, but I don't know how dramatically it'll shift the overall shipping patterns.
We'll see. But then coupled with, and I figure what the number, the tariffs were going to be for China, but that could shift more to Mexico, but they're having their own issues. So we haven't seen as much, I think there's been more reporting on it than actually happening for that, but we'll see.
We'll see what how that goes.
Lori Boyer 19:29
Do you feel it's more likely that the Chinese tariffs pass versus the, I know there's like Canada, Mexico stuff?
Chris Caplice 19:35
Yeah, it'll, it'll happen. It's one of the few things that both parties agree on.
Lori Boyer 19:40
So any recommendation for people right now? I know a lot of people.
Chris Caplice 19:43
Well, it's already happening.
Lori Boyer 19:44
I was going to say, they've already been bringing stuff in, but.
Chris Caplice 19:47
Yeah, yeah. So, the, the advance, I mean, shippers aren't stupid, right? Carriers aren't stupid. So when the ILS, ILA strike was pending in earlier this fall everyone, the big shipping months were July, August, September, which was like two months ahead of normal.
And it was to avoid the strike, which still isn't settled yet, right? We still get another bite of the apple.
Lori Boyer 20:10
Postponed.
Chris Caplice 20:11
Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see what happens with that. A lot of interesting flipping of unions loyalties between parties, kind of interesting. But, and so we saw the same thing for the tariffs.
A lot of advanced shipping in, you hear the stories of especially small shippers bring in a lot now just to stock up for the year. So we're going to see a lot of heavy inventory costs in, cause it's not free. Right. It's not, you gotta pay for it.
Lori Boyer 20:37
Is it, do you feel like it's going to clog up some of the ports or, you know, slow things down as people are bringing in extra inventory early?
Chris Caplice 20:44
I haven't seen it. I haven't, you know, tracking, I've not caught wind of that if that's happening now.
Lori Boyer 20:51
We'll hope it won't happen then. What about global conflict which we know will happen and is happening? Supply chain disruptions, you know, what what what's going on there?
Chris Caplice 21:03
Yeah, it really depends on how things escalate. I mean it could go so many different ways, you know, we saw that the Houthis were impacting travel lanes and that, that changed things, but shippers, carriers, they adapt.
And so all it does is means longer lead time. So therefore you have to carry a little extra inventory. So the, the supply chain, the global supply chains are so dynamic and flexible, but there's always a little bit of adjusting time. It's similar when there's like a disaster, a natural disaster, like a hurricane.
There's always a sharp shock, but it's usually bounded geographically and temporally because this system recovers. We're very good at self healing. Like remember the Baltimore bridge when that was a code and damaged. It didn't. I mean, the people who were mainly affected were the people living in north of Baltimore commuting into D.C. every day, right? But as far as freight impact, it was contained and they adjusted. So the I think the days of the 90s where we get caught flat footed and people are putting all their stuff through one port, those days are gone. And so we're much more savvy, information is much more available, a lot of advanced information.
There's companies like Resilinc out there that are keeping companies apprised of potential things happening. I think people have been burnt by the pandemic so much, we, we still have our antennas out and we're starting to say and be more reactive, which makes us much more nimble. So I think a lot of lessons were learned during the pandemic, not all decision making slowed back down again.
But I think when, when crisis happened, I think we're better at adapting and reacting much faster.
Lori Boyer 22:48
I love that. What do you? So let's say somebody is kind of new to the industry. Maybe they haven't learned all the lessons. In terms of resilience and risk management and all of that, are there some tips you have that you could recommend to people?
You know, how did they? Is it diversification of different routes? And is it, you know, having, going through scenarios? What do you recommend people do if they're wanting to make sure that they're ready to be resilient?
Chris Caplice 23:14
I think the big thing is it's, it's, it's the attitude and understanding, getting your organization with the right mindset. Up here at MIT we've done a lot of work in the scenario planning where, where you envision, instead of doing a forecast where you're forecasting what the future will be, you're saying, okay, if the future looks like X, you know, what would I do? If it looks like Y, what would I do? So it's more responsive. So as opposed to boxing, it's judo, right?
And so but people confuse that sometimes with being a forecasting method, and it's not. It's really just a training tool. It's like doing calisthenics or box drills or something for a sport. It gets your organization to think, to do two things. One is pay attention to things beyond their four walls, you know, start paying attention. And then getting used to being able to make these quicker decisions and be able to pivot. And so if you look at it, you really have robustness and flexibility, right. And so robustness, I can add more inventory, add more capacity.
It costs something but you know That's one way to cover uncertainty. The other is being more flexible. And that's where like dual contracting having more creative contracts and in terms that you can change. So having a mix of those two things is the way to think about it. Where do I build in robustness, redundancy, those kind of things?
Where do I build in flexibility and having options? And between those two, you just want to set things up. So for transportation in my area. Think about the portfolio of dedicated fleet that you own the assets as a shipper, a contract where you have some kind of one way contracts and then dynamic. So you probably want a mix of all three of those, depending on the type of transportation network that you have.
So the dedicated stuff is stuff you control, you have total control over it. And so that's good in case something happens, you can keep your product flowing. And the other side, if you need to have some kind of dynamic, set of capacity in, in your portfolio because stuff happens and you need to be able to tie into that.
So we're seeing a lot of innovative stuff happening between brokers and shippers where they're setting up contracts where they don't know the rate but they will, the shipper will say, hey, here's a, here's a load. It's on a small lane that doesn't happen that often. And the brokers will come back instantly with a price sale guarantee.
So that requires a couple of things. One is the, the broker or the, that provider needs to have technology to be able to auto generate a rate. And the shipper needs to have a way of reaching multiple at one time. It's like a private network, a private marketplace. Instead of setting up a contract for everything, because most of those contracts for infrequently traveled lanes fail anyway.
So I think the big answer I, kind of going around to answer your question, I think the biggest thing that an organization can do to be resilient is to improve the quality of the people and get them thinking in a resilient mindset. And to do that you go through contingency drills. You do scenario planning, you plan for something because if if you plan for one type of disaster and something else happens, all the things you learned about how to react to a disaster can still apply. You don't have to train for every potential type of disaster or event. It's the idea of being able to react to events, process them, set up the communication, make decisions. That's what's important. Like I said, it's calisthenics.
It's not forecasting for one certain type of event to happen.
Lori Boyer 26:43
So just like calisthenics, it's something that needs to be kind of ongoing, not just a one time and done. Do you have a recommended cadence, or you say quarterly you should test?
Chris Caplice 26:53
I don't have anything top of my mind, but I think doing something, you know, once a year type thing or quarterly, part of the regular training exercise.
Lori Boyer 27:00
Yes.
Chris Caplice 27:00
And then do a debrief afterwards of what, what happened, what worked, what didn't work. A lot of times stuff happens and there's no debrief. There's no learnings afterwards. And you can do a lot of this. You know, most schools will have different programs you can do, different things that you can run.
So it's something that can be done with, with different organizations.
Lori Boyer 27:20
Oh, that's awesome. So, okay. So we talked about the market turning. We talked about tariffs. We talked about supply chain disruptions and resilience when it comes to, you know, global conflict and whatnot. Any other trends that you kind of see 2025, kind of earlier with looking at the ChatGPT stuff touched on you know, on automation and sustainability.
Chris Caplice 27:43
Well, it's funny that that they didn't look at AI itself.
Lori Boyer 27:50
Yes!
Chris Caplice 27:51
You know, the incorporation of AI into, into different processes. It's starting to come. You know, chatbots and those kind of things.
Lori Boyer 27:59
How well do you think companies are doing at actually implementing it? Or, on the flip side, where do you think it's actually usable right now?
Chris Caplice 28:07
It's, I, I'm, I know of many pilots, some fail, some successful. The ones that seem to be the most successful are the ones that are identifying a problem and saying, hey, gen AI might work here rather than I've got a gen AI hammer, let me find something. And so I think that the things where, as I best understand, I'm no expert at, at AI is where there's a lot of unstructured data and you need to make sense of it.
For example, in DAT, we use something internal called Glean and it's, it's meant for just for the inside of an organization. And cause if, I don't know if you use Slack or, you know, all these things, the problem is you remember you had a conversation with someone about this two months ago, you don't remember.
And so what Glean will do, you can query and say, hey, who, who did I talk to about blah and what do it, it'll pull everything down. You can ask it to summarize a whole Slack channel so you can brief yourself. That is very useful. And that's something you know, we all have email, stuff buried there, buried in texts and it's able to pull all that together.
To me, anytime you want to organize, synthesize unstructured data, it makes a ton of sense. I've had that, that makes sense. Where it doesn't make sense to me as much is and you're seeing a lot of this for TMSs where they have a ChatGPT or something is tied into it, where you're asking the TMS for recommendations.
And the thing is with a TMS, the data is so structured. It's incredibly structured, so you, you know the questions you're going to ask. What lane should I be looking at? Which carriers are having a problem with? What regions are, you know the questions, it's not that hard. Now, as we tie into other unstructured data, maybe there'll be some insights.
One thing that we're, that DAT is to helping a shipper, a broker, decide and, and find carriers that might be suitable for them give and that that might fit, that they have high security, you know, they, all these different things.
Lori Boyer 30:13
Like niche and specific. Yeah.
Chris Caplice 30:15
Yeah. But to also make sure, you know, 'cause fraud is a, is a big issue right now, carriers.
So being able to identify that and try and find trusted carriers, that makes a lot of sense for gen AI. Because there's a lot of unstructured data out there. So I think that's the hallmark, answer a question that's really, people are trying to solve. And if there's unstructured data there that you can leverage, maybe that makes sense.
Lori Boyer 30:40
That's interesting, Chris. I love that because I've talked to a lot of people about AI, but that's the first time I've heard that specifically. Unstructured data really brings in a light bulb to me.
Chris Caplice 30:50
And there's other things people do. We have projects up here at MIT where they're using it in procurement to kind of make sense to a lot of like indirect procurement and try to. Because there's a lot of garbage right there. You know that, and so to me that's that's where the the sweet spot is right now. Now that might change. But and where you're trying to span across multiple databases, sets things like that.
And again, if it's unstructured, it's really good at making sense of those things.
Lori Boyer 31:20
Absolutely. Okay. Anything else that you feel like is going to be a trend? We're coming up towards the end of time. So anything you feel like we've missed that's going to be important in 2025?
Chris Caplice 31:29
Oh, gosh, who knows? The the new administration is going to be really interesting.
Lori Boyer 31:34
It's going to be a ride, huh?
Chris Caplice 31:36
Wherever you fall on either side. There'll be some things shook up and we'll see how that how that reacts. I'm a, I'm a definitely an optimist when it comes to these things. So I'm excited to see what 2025 will look like. A lot of challenges out there, but no, I'm, I'm excited to see.
Lori Boyer 31:54
Challenges are often just opportunities as well, right? Opportunities for us to find something new and to grow and to develop a new technology or something else. So that is awesome. Chris, thank you so much. This has been amazing. Any if anyone wants to follow you or if they want to learn about DAT or, or what you're doing over at MIT, you know, how, can they follow you on LinkedIn?
How could they connect with you?
Chris Caplice 32:19
Sure, I'm in LinkedIn. I don't think there's another Chris Caplice out there, so you can just look for me there. Or you can go to the podcast I do called Freight Vine that's released every other Thursday, and you go to DAT's site and find out information on that. Or go to MIT and you can look at the Center for Transportation Logistics.
So I'm pretty transparent. I'm pretty much everywhere there.
Lori Boyer 32:41
He's pretty fantastic. So thank you again for being here and have a fantastic 2025. Can't wait to see what happens.
Chris Caplice 32:49
All right. Thanks. Appreciate it.