Patrick is Vice President of AI & Data Science responsible for 3 core functions – AI Governance, Data Enablement and Business Intelligence & Analytics at AIT Worldwide logistics reporting to the President. Over the past 25 years, he has been assisting many Fortune 500 organizations make appropriate and intelligent decisions based on facts instead of intuition to substantiate key decisions making at the operational, tactical & strategic levels. Patrick strongly believes that AI & Data Science together with Business Intelligence is about leveraging technology & process to build strong data foundation and transforming data into information, information into knowledge and knowledge into actions. Intelligence is derived by harnessing insights leading to pivotal business actions and decisions ultimately leading to become a data-driven organization.
Patrick’s Professional Journey and Key Experiences in Logistics
After spending many enjoyable years entrenched in IT Support, & OLAP development, I had a nagging desire to understand how the business side operates as consumers of IT deliveries. That propelled me to cross the bridge several times into business functions which included Operations, Finance and Strategy. Having sharpened my business-operations-data prudency, I continue broadening my data-driven aspirations across several industries, adding Logistics to my vertical repertoire makes logical sense as my next step. Supply Chain Logistics ecosystem, process and data landscape is complex, convoluted and challenging so it is an attraction to me.
Trends and Technology Advancements in AI and Data Science
Today’s “instant-everything” culture has customers demanding instantaneous fulfillment driving the need and technological capabilities to track every shipment from origin to destination providing traceability or progress. This is profoundly challenging in today’s last mile disparate applications/systems with yesterday’s need to integrate them in addition to non-negotiables on-time deliveries, accuracy and speed. It’s the stretch between digitization and digitalization that’s only possible with strong data foundation and a well-integrated network. Given the bountiful offerings of AI capabilities, organizations taking advantage of AI by delivering value will lead the pack. Logistics industries enabling end-to-end integration from First, Middle to Last Mile including warehousing capabilities becoming more agilely responsive to Customer’s needs will distinguish themselves. Pile on RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to trainable GenAI with expanded new data, fresh insight, more comprehensive models’ capabilities will render extensive valued outcomes including descriptive, predictive and prescriptive endeavors. I called this the “Extra Mile” effect.
“Upscale your talents through AI literacy so that they become conducive to emerging technologies. Start thinking ways to rewire yourself, functioning more effectively”
Gartner’s recent survey indicated 72 percent of respondents believe their AI ML efforts are directly impacted by their data readiness which needs to be addressed upfront. If you want reliable and accurate decisions for qualitative outcomes, prioritize data enablement with AI Governance council to manage hallucinations, misinformation, data leaks, risk and compliance.
Addressing Challenges in the Logistics Industry
AI will become a pivotal must-have with real-time data and yesteryear’s demand to integrate 3PL or 4PL logistics operations, stitching First, Middle & Last Mile players (customers, partners, agents, carriers, drivers, 3rd party data providers) for a unified view will continue to be a challenge.
This spans across today’s digitization & digitalization mixed challenges. We will continue to this tussle between these two across goals, cost, effort and culture racing to maturity. You can’t stay ahead or keep pace if you choose to remain constant.
Technology in Use at Worldwide Logistics
AIT Worldwide logistic is a rather unique organization with 5 modes spreading across 11 verticals. Our services are never one-size fits all. One of the major reasons of our continued success is our collaborative logistics professionals working with our customers to design specific, efficient and unique needs.
Our lake house platform hosts standard TMS, including some major players sprinkled across various Cloud environments with widely used applications and platform stacks. We are aggressively digitizing and digitalizing ourselves in several areas to poise AIT to be in the AI-ML forefront wave. As our CEO Vaughn Moore & President Keith Tholan have said, AIT is continually looking towards the future and one of our eventual goals is to be in the forefront of these AI offerings while also being prudent to understand the symbiotic relationship between our data enablement foundation & AI. Our priority is to tenaciously build high data quality standards and enablement and drive to improve our outcomes thereby earning our customers continued trust along with our stakeholders.
We continually win our customers’ trust by being present, listening to their needs or problems while launching technological advances as partners.
Adopting Emerging logistics approaches
Leverage “centrifugal thinking” to rewire yourself. Upscale your talents through AI literacy so that they become conducive to emerging technologies. Start thinking on ways to rewire yourself, functioning more effectively where each employee begins to expound their “centrifugal thinking” attribute. What is “centrifugal thinking” then? It is the element that forces you to become not being the ordinary, just like Planet Haumea, an oval (football) shape planet. Discovered in 2004 Haumea’s shape is completely different from any spherical planets because of its high spinning velocity at 16,191 kph caused by Centrifugal force stretching beyond its normal feature. How can Organization begin stretching our employees beyond normal thinking to potentially differentiate? Promoting critical thinking is one fundamental way. Be disruptive by partnering with your Customers to find disruptors.
