The past few years have been eye opening for many of us who spend most of our daily lives in the various metropolitan areas spread across the world. We are afforded the luxury of convenience, without having to worry about the menial tasks and logistics necessary to bring something like a t-shirt to your local Nordstrom big box retailer or a coffee bean half-way across the world to your local Starbucks. Collecting coffee beans or t-shirts, loading them onto a ship or truck and sending a bill to the end client isn’t glamorous or particularly difficult, filled with repetitive tasks that don’t require much dynamic thought or strategy. When most people think of Artificial Intelligence, they think of it taking over for laborers in more manual labor intensive industries, but it’s quickly evolved to begin taking over service based jobs as well. In an industry like shipping and transport, filled with inefficiencies and error-prone manual processing of contracts, invoices and other simple and repetitive tasks, it is ripe for the introduction of AI; Especially when such tasks can be accomplished for a fraction of the cost of traditional labor.
Shipping and logistics have been largely left-behind as far as adoption of new technology is concerned, but that’s swiftly changing as the few forward-thinking ones begin adopting AI solutions to reduce costs, boost efficiencies and reduce errors. Companies like Chicago based startup HubTran have been changing the landscape by offering companies that facilitate long-distance shipping solutions a competitive advantage. Because of the rapidity with which a computer can sieve data for relevant documents and match things like invoices, shipping brokers are able to process their workload up to 4 times faster than what their human-run processing and invoicing department can typically accomplish. Let’s throw in some numbers to quantify the value to these brokers shall we?
If they employ a single person that’s able to process up to 100 invoices a day and they pay that person $20/hour, they’re looking at a daily cost of $160 or $1.60 per invoice. Introduce an AI solution, such as the one offered by HubTran, and assume they charge $1.00 per invoice for the solution.
The number of daily invoices processed per person jumps to 400.
The total cost jumps to $160 for one person, plus $400 for the transactions.
The cost per day becomes $560 for 400 transactions or $1.40 per transaction.
The end result, the company is able to operate 12.5% cheaper while simultaneously improving processing by 300%. Instead of employing 4 people to process invoices for a year, the broker could employ one person and buy HubTran’s AI service and save themselves $40,000 a year. In other words, not only does the AI solution allow the company to save money on costs, but removes the bottleneck of manual processing of invoices and allows the Broker to scale their operation more quickly. No brainer!
So the next time you think of job loss in this country, hesitate to point the finger at immigrants and think outside simple manual labor. AI is coming for the service based industry in force!
As always, let me know your thoughts down below in the comments section. If you have questions about AI solutions specific to your situation, feel free to shoot me a detailed e-mail using the contact me link and I will get back to you as soon as I can.
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