Freight transport and logistics company Flexport is rolling out a range of new products and features, many using AI.
If that sounds similar to Airbnb’s approach to seasonal product announcements, it was because it was the inspiration for Flexport’s new approach.
“Brian Chesky told me to do that,” Flexport founder Ryan Petersen mentioned Airbnb’s CEO in an interview. “He gave an incredible lecture about Paul Graham writing an essay called ‘Founder Mode’.
According to Flexport, the next product release will be “end of summer.”
Petersen told TechCrunch that moving on to two “release” cadences per year has two major benefits. For one, “There’s no such thing as a deadline power,” he said. The other is about marketing.
“We’ve developed a lot of great technology over the years, but it’s coming out in stages, in fanfare, buzz and in ways that allow our customers to see what you’ve done, what you’ve built. I don’t have many opportunities to tell the story,” Petersen told TechCrunch.
Flexport launched more than 20 products on Monday, many of which are already in use internally, all equipped with a combination of Openai, humanity and AWS AI. The big product promotion comes when Petersen completed his first year as CEO of Flexport after firing former Amazon executive Dave Clark in late 2023. [Flexport’s] An orderly house. ”
The new product is Flexport Intelligence. This allows businesses to use natural language prompts to retrieve information about shipping. Another, called the Control Tower, provides customers with “real-time visibility and control over the entire logistics network, even for cargo that is not managed by Flexport.”
Previously, these were things Flexport staff did for customers. They rely on AI to perform these tasks, and essentially, their relationship is a major change for the company. Particularly, Petersen fired Clark because he felt the company underestimated its customer relationship.
“This is something we’re really conscious about. I still believe in the ‘first people’,” Petersen said. He said the new product will offer “the best of both worlds.” He said that because companies still call members of their flexport teams (ideally those who know them well) and can get help if they need to do that or like it.
To that end, Petersen said he hopes that accepting AI will help Flexport grow its rank, rather than replacing workers.
“I think the company will be us, but there will be fewer workers in the company that does the best job to automate this task. You will grow so fast, so you have more If it’s cheaper than others, it takes more people than ever to do service, sell, consult, technology, development, etc.,” he said.
Another effort announced by Flexport on Monday is to include AI-powered voice agents in some of its own workflows.
Petersen emphasized that Flexport is carefully introducing this feature. The company is currently testing this in truck drivers and warehouses using logistics platforms. The AI Voice Agent will call the driver, tell them that there is a load that can be picked up in their area, and then call the warehouse for basic details such as opening hours.
Petersen said this would help with these simple conversations, but that Flexport is closing these transactions through the usual workflows on the platform. He said he was “hesitant” to hurry to include voice agents in the rest of Flexport’s business until his capabilities and reliability improve.
“My standard quality bar for making these things aimed at customers is really high,” he said. “If you’re really good at answering questions, I think there’s a future where customers are happy to talk to AI.”
That doesn’t mean Petersen’s plan to move slowly across the AI. In fact, he said he loves the speed that Flexport was able to experiment with.
“Where our team sees [customer] Just find a process that can be better done by pain and LLM or other forms of machine learning. And the next day, it’s live, it’s used by thousands of companies without going to the enterprise contracts or billing people,” he said.
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