Each generation grapples with the next generation entering the workforce. AI is causing similar complexities. A 2011 research note from the accounting giant PWC advised Gen X managers on the then-upcoming millennials entering the workforce: “Millennials want flexibility. They work well with clear instructions and concrete targets.” The millennial generation came of age during a technological revolution and witnessed massive economic upheaval from 9/11 to Bernie Madoff to perennial federal budget stalemates. Naturally, their approach to work diverged from the Gen Xers before them.

Today, we face revolutions of our own. In addition to a newer generation joining the workforce, AI has also crossed the threshold from concept to reality, and employers are taking note. AI’s promise has long dominated the public interest. In Hollywood, Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey brought many firsts to the public consciousness, perhaps the most prescient of which being an autonomous AI agent that surpasses the abilities of its human creators. Since that was science fiction, the need for drama painted the AI as a villain. Today’s AI is here, but in much more innocuous ways. In the blink of an eye, the tech industry has shipped AI chatbots that mimic human responses, AI presentation designers, AI meeting notetakers, AI speech synthesis tools that rival native narrators, AI video clip generators, and countless more tools.

Despite economic uncertainty and heightened federal interest rates in most of the developed world, the AI industry has raked in a record-breaking $29.1 billion in venture funding in 2023.

All this hype around AI is certain to turn some heads. To the moving industry, it invokes some soul-searching:

Is the value promised by AI real?

Is it good for the moving industry?

How should we adapt?

Meet AI, the task accelerator. The consulting giant McKinsey studied the effects of generative AI on the economy and came to the banner conclusion that AI will automate 60 to 70% of employee time. What does this mean for us humans? Do we all become obsolete?

The opposite, actually. The study pointed out the inevitable—that the nature of work will change, but this change can leave us all better off. Tasks would need to evolve to get jobs done, but jobs are here to stay. The study was comprehensive but the results are intuitive—with the proliferation of AI tools, someone still needs to manage the processes, house the data, give the AI the input, interpret the output, and make sure the overall job is being done. For example, in the marketing industry, AI didn’t replace copywriters, but the copywriters who use AI accomplish much more than those who don’t. The nature of work changes, but work is not rendered obsolete.

How can the moving industry adapt? It can be tempting to conclude that AI doesn’t apply to asset-heavy industries such as moving. New technology is daunting, but history has a tendency to repeat. Think of the PC revolution in the 1980s, or mobile computing in the 2010s. The technological innovations created new industries and new opportunities, often in unexpected places. The idea of a successful moving company today that eschewed these two revolutions is almost unthinkable.

There are several areas where moving companies can position themselves to maximize the benefit of the AI revolution:

Prioritize education and training. With so many AI tools and products out there, it can be challenging to stay on top of it all. Allocating time to survey the market, pilot new tools, and implement new processes is more critical than before. The promise of AI is improvement by orders of magnitude—this is what is being left behind if time is not taken to incorporate AI tools into the workflow. As a co-founder of Yembo.ai, I have been in the AI industry for almost a decade. Even to me, the pace of innovation seems to have picked up in the past year. To give an example, when preparing for the Latin America and Caribbean Moving Association’s 2024 keynote on AI, four of my ten main examples became obsolete during the three months when I was preparing my talk. This speaks to how fast things are changing.

The promise of AI is real—if tedious tasks that take hours can be done in minutes, is that really worth giving up because it’s too complicated? Moving companies have valuable resources that are accustomed to monitoring processes and dealing with exceptions—the operations team. Enterprising companies can allocate time for these teams to monitor the tools on the market, run pilots, and integrate the best into their workflows. After all, isn’t it the operations team that has to fix issues when problems arise?

Embrace solutions that minimize errors and streamline communication. One of the fundamental promises of AI is that it is infinitely scalable—it is always on, doesn’t have good days and bad days, and can handle all the data you throw at it. The moving industry is logistically quite complicated, with a lot of details that need to go right for a satisfied shipper at the end of the day. This situation provides a ripe opportunity for AI to streamline, monitor, and provide consistency where the alternative was to take best-effort approaches. The sheer volume of details no longer needs to be a deterrent.

Focus on expansion. AI provides tools for growth, but it’s still up to us humans to identify the opportunities and put the tools to work for us. We can apply the technology to expand our markets in new and unconventional ways. To understand the effects AI can have on an industry, it can be helpful to study its effects on other industries.

Take the publishing industry. Speech synthesis tools have been around for quite some time but until recently, they hadn’t had much effect on book publishers. After all, who would want to listen to a 5-hour audiobook in Siri’s robotic voice? Then the AI revolution came around and speech synthesis became quite good. So good, in fact, that AI today can clone a human’s voice and synthesize speech that is often indistinguishable from the original speaker.

The publishing and distribution companies scrambled. Some banned AI. Some embraced it. Savvy voice actors started licensing their voice so they could collect royalties from the resulting work. What we see now is an industry transformed by AI. The industry still has human workers, but the scope of what a human can do is magnified. A single narrator can clone her voice and synthesize audiobooks in dozens of languages with just a few hours of work. AI is reducing the barrier to entry, and this enables a world where information is more accessible to wider audiences at an affordable price point. AI causes fundamental change, but the change creates new and more winners.

Unfortunately, the moving industry is one that customers often complain about to watchdog organizations. But this challenge presents an opportunity. For a large company, the time it takes to review every customer feedback point can be prohibitive. Large language models such as ChatGPT or Claude allow for large-scale analysis of customer feedback. As a simple exercise, take all the BBB feedback or Yelp ratings from your company and upload it into a tool like ChatGPT. Ask what do customers like most about your company’s experience? What are the areas they complain the most? How might a diligent company improve to address these concerns?

In workflows like these, it’s important to point out that AI doesn’t take a job away—a human still needs to feed in the input, ask the right questions, and embark on the innately human task of winning folks over to implement new processes. But AI makes it easier to spot trends that would otherwise remain hidden. A human can take a few minutes and realize the benefit of reading thousands of feedback points.

This mentality applies to growth as well. Previously, to expand in a new geography, a mover would generally need to establish a new remote office with new surveyors, warehouses, trucks, and crew members. But with AI surveying tools, movers can centralize call centers. This allows companies to expand their footprint with significantly less capital expenditure than historically required by expansion.

For international movers, machine translation and AI transcription reduce the barriers of language, allowing for collaboration more efficiently to provide superior service.

The real intelligence in all of this isn’t artificial; it’s in recognizing the value of these tools and using them to our advantage. I’d encourage us all to embrace the promise AI provides. Let’s share best practices, tackle tough problems, and make the industry better. If you’d like to chat further, feel free to pick up the phone and have your AI voice clone give me a call.