AI has started taking on the work people used to do.
To understand something, to judge it, to act on it, you always needed a person's time.AI is changing that premise.For the first time, we can hand work that used to take human intelligence to software.We believe this shift will completely remake the way a great many industries work and grow.
We chose freight forwarding as the first of those industries.Forwarding is the industry that coordinates the whole process on its customers' behalf, so that cargo can move around the world.The global forwarding industry, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, still runs on the email, spreadsheets, phone calls and judgment of a great many people.People check schedules, prepare documents, key data into systems and get in touch with other companies, and when something goes wrong, they work out the situation and respond all over again.
So when volume grew, headcount had to grow with it.For a long time, that formula was simply taken for granted.More volume = more peopleWe intend to change that formula.
What Olive builds is not an AI assistant that makes things a little easier for people.It is an AI employee that actually takes on the work people used to do.It reads the email, understands the situation, decides what to do next, operates the systems, communicates with other companies and follows the work until it is done.And it calls on a person only at the moments that truly need human judgment and accountability.
Nor is it custom SI work for one particular company.We are building AI that any forwarding company can hire and put to work, just like a person.
To solve this, we went to work at a forwarding company ourselves and sat down next to its staff.We read the real email, looked at the real systems, and learned, one thing at a time, why the work is done the way it is.And one task at a time, we are handing the work people used to do over to Olive.
The market we are looking at is not simply the market for forwarding software.It is the operations themselves, performed by people across a global forwarding industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
People build relationships with customers, create new business, make the important decisions and answer for the results.And AI takes on the countless steps of execution in between.The moment this becomes possible, the very way a company grows changes.
A few years from now, we hope someone at a forwarding company asks:“Who is handling this?”And we hope the answer comes back, as naturally as anything:“Olive is.”
We intend to run the operations of forwarding companies around the world ourselves.