Making AI Smarter by Eliminating Flawed Data Jim Barnebee, GetSwift’s VP for AI and Infrastructure, was granted a US Patent for his pioneering work with knowledge graphs.

Making AI Smarter by Eliminating Flawed Data Jim Barnebee, GetSwift’s VP for AI and Infrastructure, was granted a US Patent for his pioneering work with knowledge graphs.

by | Dec 16, 2019 | Artificial Intelligence, Clients, delivery management software

  • GetSwift’s VP of AI Jim Barnebee

Artificial intelligence algorithms require gobs of data. With each introduction of new and varied data sets, machine learning applications mature. The better and more comprehensive the data, the better the outcome.

But what happens when the training set that informs AI is corrupted with flawed data?

Not great things, as it turns out. That’s why Jim Barnebee, GetSwift’s Vice President of Artificial Intelligence, and his former colleagues from IBM’s Watson Group invented a system to allow machine-learning applications to interpret the quality of new data through a process called veracity. The US Patent and Trademark Office granted Jim and his three colleagues from IBM a patent this past September.

The patent solved several of the most persistent problems in the world of knowledge graphs, massive data and Ai, like the need to continually retrain machine-learning systems to distinguish between unique stores of data.

Not all data is equal because of its location or time of creation, and for systems that consume data like rocket fuel, that’s problematic. That’s why Jim and the team created the concept of veracity to allow a machine learning system to vet the truthfulness of datasets and, in turn, determine when knowledge graphs should use those datasets to get updated with more reliable data.

For businesses, the applications of veracity are enormously important.

Consider: if your company sells shoes around the globe, you have massive amounts of data about those sales and the supply chain that feeds them in every location.

Aside from the language and cultural barriers, you have strong and weak markets and varying levels of data quality. Yet you desperately want your data to tell you which models of shoes are flying off the shelves, where are data anomalies, and where there’s possible theft or fraud. AI can be trained to search for these and other anomalies once the data is made available and truth versus non-truth can be defined and replicated.

And to make this pattern completely auditable, the patent also includes the use of blockchain to create a transparent and accountable record. Blockchain is a better audit path than human memory.

This is much like the way humans learn, absorbing information as we grow and experience the world, replacing earlier constructs with better ones that form our understanding going forward.  This process—that is, constantly improving knowledge graphs—has been eluding AI researchers for quite a long time.

You can view the full patent here.

Jim’s training in both ontology (which, in computer science, is essentially the representation of the knowledge from a set of concepts) and blockchain helped the team technically solve the twin problems of veracity and memory. A former DARPA developer with groundbreaking work on Java as a language and encryption tool for the US Navy, Jim worked on ontologies and knowledge graphs for years before joining IBM Watson. Previously he served as the ontology evangelist at Unisys, led custom ontology work at Orbis, and also founded and moderates one of LinkedIn’s largest ontology special interest groups.

Jim continues to use his expertise in AI as a VP at GetSwift, alongside a uniquely talented (and growing) team assembled by CTO Dennis Noto. Jim and the team are using AI to transform cloud-based, real-time delivery management software into the next generation of computing. To stay up to date with the latest developments at GetSwift and apply for future opportunities, follow GetSwift on LinkedIn.

GetSwift’s Last-Mile Software Helps Culinary Care Deliver Free Meals to Chicago Cancer Patients, Prepare for National Rollout

GetSwift’s Last-Mile Software Helps Culinary Care Deliver Free Meals to Chicago Cancer Patients, Prepare for National Rollout

by | Aug 21, 2019 | Clients, Delivery software

Courtney White (right) Founded Nonprofit Culinary Care After Her Father’s Death

Courtney White founded Culinary Care in 2013 as a tribute to her late father. The mission was to bring cheer to other cancer patients in the form of high-quality meals delivered to Chicago hospitals. In short order, Culinary Care was delivering thousands of meals a year around the city, and she needed a software platform to keep ensure patients were never left hungry on account of a delivery mishap.

“I was manually putting everything into Google spreadsheets,” Ms. White says. “All of the scheduled deliveries were being pushing into Google Calendar invitations and I realized it just wasn’t working. I was at wits end.”

She explored other options, including Uber’s scheduling platform. But Uber required that she use their drivers rather than her own – something that would not work because Culinary Care relies heavily on staff who also add a personal touch to deliveries.

“Finally, I found that GetSwift managed everything I did manually – from scheduling to phone numbers,” Ms. White says. GetSwift’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform allows her to communicate directly with drivers, reducing the chance of late meal deliveries and dramatically increasing the amount of volume Culinary Care can accommodate.

Looking ahead, the next step is to take Culinary Care to more cities. Ms. White says she regularly gets requests from all over the country from people interested in bringing Culinary Care to feed cancer patients in their cities. “We have a map of the requests and our goal over the next five years is to expand and grow Culinary Care nationwide,” she says.

Culinary Care served 2,800 meals across Chicago in 2018. This year, the nonprofit is on track to delivering between 3,000 and 3,500 meals and the goal is to reach 100,000 meals served by 2023, Culinary Care’s 10th anniversary.

“We are excited about the chance to help Culinary Care thrive in Chicago and expand to other cities,” says Joel Macdonald, Founder and President of GetSwift. “It’s a wonderful cause and our platform is perfectly suited to help Culinary Care reach scale.”

One reason Culinary Care has caught so much attention: It focuses purely on cancer patients, who are more challenging to feed than most. The reason is that cancer treatments including chemotherapy tend to stifle appetites and even change the experience of taste. That requires Culinary Care to seek out the most appealing meals from local restaurants that donate food.

“We are the only organization nationwide that serves only cancer patients,” Ms. White says. “They’re a unique client because they’re often not actually hungry and we need to make the experience special.”

She added that there are plenty of organizations delivering to cancer patients, but it’s rarely more than 20% that goes to cancer patients. The pure focus on cancer patients appears to be more challenging, but Ms. White’s personal experience guided her in that direction.

She learned all about the challenge of feeding cancer patients from her father. During the last months of his life, friends and neighbors brought meals that she shared with her father and family that helped bring them to together and give them one less worry.

 “We pay close attention to the emotional element of a dish,” Ms. White says. “GetSwift lets me focus on the most important things we do.”

Interested in conquering the chaos of delivery? GetSwift can help you start improving your delivery operation in hours. Get in touch.

Q&A With GetSwift CTO Dennis Noto

Q&A With GetSwift CTO Dennis Noto

by | Jun 14, 2019 | Clients, Culture, Delivery software, Uncategorized

GetSwift’s head of tech answers why he got into logistics, the future of the industry, and how to build a game-changing company culture.

Before joining GetSwift, Dennis Noto’s career had spanned nearly every facet of the technology industry. Most recently, as the Executive Architect/CTO of IBM’s Watson for Business, he advised Fortune 500 companies on how to harness AI for their business. Before that, Noto spent much of his career as a financial services CIO helping financial institutions accomplish big tasks such as clearing billions of Wall Street trades instantly. And, in 2012, he won the CTO 100 Award for his work as CIO of Trust Company of America, where he developed a trading application that financial advisors could use across any browser or device.

Last year, he became the CTO of GetSwift, with the task to improve, evolve and build the most advanced logistics technology platform in the industry. We asked him about his vision to improve logistics and delivery management, how to spark innovation, and what it takes to build a strong company culture.

Why did you want to get into delivery management?

I’ve spent most of my career in fintech and was looking to apply everything I’ve learned—high-transaction volumes, real-time systems, innovative product, great UX, solving problems with simplicity, and more—to a brand new industry. I looked at delivery management and did my research. Everything today is delivery, competition in the field was open, and the technology in logistics was, frankly, old. It begged for software as a service. I saw a green field, so I said to myself, “It’s time to take a proven methodology from fintech to build game-changing logistics industry technology.”

What is the big opportunity to make a difference in delivery management?

The big opportunity is that logistics is so much more than dispatch, routing, and tracking your deliveries, and we’re building a holistic platform that not only helps you deliver efficiently but fuels your whole business. We offer business intelligence that you can feed back into your delivery system and overall business, seamless cash management, scheduling your drivers, an online customer marketplace to sell your products, and beyond. We are already offering more of these pie slices—thanks to our acquisition Delivery Biz Pro and Scheduling+—but many more features are coming down the pike.

You’ve written before about your goal of wowing customers. What do you mean by this?

When you’re bringing a product to market, it’s so important that it helps your customer increase revenue, cut expenses, automate, upsell or cross-sell. What is also really critical is that it wows a customer with UX and UI Experience that knocks them off their seat.

How do you wow customers in delivery management?

You wow the dispatcher on how easy it is to automate tens of thousands of deliveries at once to your fleet of drivers; you wow your drivers with the seamless mobile app experience to accept and manage orders; you wow the CEO because they’re optimizing time-to-deliver and meeting the revenue metrics to run their business; and you’re wowing the end customer because they’re getting a better product, sooner, and they’re well-informed before, during, and after the delivery.

When I asked you about wowing I thought maybe you’d talk about product, and it’s interesting that most of your answer was about user experience.

Product and UX go together. As a user, you need both. Let me tell a story. At Trust Company of America (where Noto was CIO for four years) our customers were large financial advisory firms, and we decided to do something new: allow CPAs to run their trading applications right form their tablets. At first there was pushback, with our client wondering how they’d train CPAs. So I put the iPad app in the hands of the COO and told him, “Give it to all your people. If they can’t run this app without a user’s manual, I failed at my job.” They all loved it. The point was: we combined complicated features with awesome customer experience. If you can’t be intuitive about what you do, you shouldn’t be bringing it to your customers.

Let’s talk about innovation and company culture. You’ve said that technology innovation is not strictly about technology anymore. Can you explain that?

We all can be on a level playing field with technology. The question is not about technology—it’s about the people that make the decisions that use the technology, who build the product to solve a problem and give the experience. You can have the best technology in the world, but if you are not solving the right problem and don’t have people to create that awesome experience, you won’t succeed. If the culture and objective isn’t right, you’re done.

How much of your time do you spend thinking about culture?

A group teach-back at the Denver office, with our Denver and New York teams together. A group teach-back at the Denver office, with our Denver and New York teams together.

A lot. It’s not that it chews up my time. But it’s a matter of how engaged you are with your people. Here’s another story. When we opened the Denver office (GetSwift’s global tech team HQ), we set up mobile sit-and-stand desks for the team. But here’s the key: I told everybody, “Let me know what you think.” Some people actually didn’t like it and wanted to be back in cubicles, so we built out that option for them. It’s about listening to people, engaging with them, and empowering them to be their best.

By the way, most of the time our team does the setting-up and building as a team because we’ve fostered that collaborative culture. When new bar stools arrive in the kitchen, our team is already setting them up. Everybody pitches in and grabs a screwdriver.

People also need to know what their purpose is in the greater good of the organization, because people are motivated by a sense of belonging—it’s actually one of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which I’m a strong believer in. That’s why we hold monthly town halls, where our leaders talk about what we’re working on and where the organization is headed. It doesn’t stop there: We also hold department “campfires” so we can discuss what’s going well and what isn’t, and group teach-backs so we can learn from each other. And then sometimes we’ll have some drinks together or, recently, we actually went out to play old arcade games. I had no idea the team wanted to do that, but it was fun!

Time for a teach-back. Business Analyst Eiden Hughes presents a heat map to help the team understand GetSwift’s trajectory this year. Time for a teach-back. Business Analyst Eiden Hughes presents a heat map to help the team understand GetSwift’s trajectory this year.

So, how’s it going at GetSwift? Are you proud of what you’re accomplishing?

We’re releasing code to production every three weeks. We probably did 1,000 stories in the first quarter. We’re producing functionality that causes our business team in New York to say “Wow! We’ve been waiting for this!”

With our customers, they are seeing a recurring steady stream of new product features, sub-system improvements, and most importantly service availability enhancements. Every three weeks, we deliver for our customers new enhancements based on unique business intelligence, and then we do it again. That kind of productive environment fuels a great culture, and then we have a virtuous cycle: people engaged in a great culture leads to even more productivity.

Is your enterprise looking to work with Dennis and his team to optimize delivery and logistics? Send us a quick note.

The GetSwift App ‘Changed The Game’ For the Drivers At Billiard Factory

The GetSwift App ‘Changed The Game’ For the Drivers At Billiard Factory

by | May 14, 2019 | Clients, Delivery software, Drivers

Live tracking and proof of delivery have elevated customer service at the game-room furnishings retail company.

 

Billiard Factory IT Director Ken Santoro says GetSwift was the “final piece” to help them perfect delivery.

About a year ago, Billiard Factory, which delivers game-room furniture from 10 stores across Texas, Nevada, and Florida, was running on manual. Prior to starting a delivery, drivers would have to make phone calls to customers to let them know when their deliveries were scheduled to arrive. After the delivery, drivers would have to jot down any problems (like a scratch on a pool table) on a paper receipt that would sit in a truck all day and not be seen be a dispatcher until the following day.

All this manual work led to all sorts of potential for mistakes—before and after delivery. Some drivers would occasionally forget to call (meaning they could show up unannounced with a pool table in-hand) and others weren’t very comfortable talking on the phone. After a delivery, Billiard Factory had very little immediate visibility of any problems or customer complaints.

But Billiard Factory has now conquered these problems with GetSwift’s driver and customer apps. Before a job, a text message gets automatically sent to customers giving them a live tracking link and an ETA, allowing them to plan their day around the delivery. After the job is complete, drivers are automatically asked to fill out proof of delivery in the GetSwift app—with room for photos, a signature, and notes. This data is immediately seen by dispatch.

“Now, we get instantaneous feedback not only with notes but with pictures,” Ken Santoro, the IT Director at Billiard Factory, said. “We can take action on those issues before the driver gets down the street.”

“We get back to the customer before they even have a chance to call us or write a bad review,”  Santoro said.

The big benefits of the app: Visibility and Automation

Driver Patrick Disney on the GetSwift app

Driver Patrick Disney on the GetSwift app

For one of Billiard Factory’s most senior installers, Patrick Disney, and his colleagues, the app has been a game-changer. Now, with the click of a button saying he is on his way, the customers he serves get a live ETA. He also clicks when he’s at the job (to let dispatch know) and when it’s completed. If you’re counting, that’s only three times that he interacts with the app during an entire delivery.

“It’s a very simple process. I can’t really complain about the little bit that I have to do,” Disney said.

But the biggest benefit he’s seen is how much the automated alerts and live tracking help customers plan their day.

Disney told the story of a customer with a beach house an hour-and-a-half from Houston, where she was at the time. “By getting her that automatically-sent GetSwift text, she was able to drop a few things, head out to the beach early, and meet us at almost the exact same time that we arrived,” he said.

“They love knowing where the drivers are at,” Santoro added. Since using the app, “customer satisfaction is way up.”

While it doesn’t happen often, something can go awry –like a driver makes a mistake or a foosball table arrives damaged—customers end up happy because the problem is immediately addressed.

“While we can see some customers are disappointed that the product came in damaged or there was a scratch, a driver will still get a 5-star review. A lot of that has to do with the driver’s know-how but a lot has to do with transparency,” Santoro said.

Using GetSwift To Elevate Their Game

Now that they have so much more transparency into their delivery operation, Santoro sees endless possibilities.

First, sales reps—who also have access to the GetSwift data—can manage all their sales cycles more effectively. The day after delivery, they can make follow-up calls armed with the photos and notes from the day before. Second, Billiard Factory can start turning installation data into business intelligence: When they know exactly how long each piece of furniture takes to install, they can plan accordingly.

Most importantly, GetSwift has helped Santoro with his #1 IT initiative: wowing customers.

“GetSwift brings transparency to our deliveries and takes our game to the next level. It’s the final piece when it comes to perfecting delivery and wowing our customers,” Santoro said.

To learn more about how GetSwift’s smart delivery platform can elevate your business, Get in touch with us.