I lead new business for Spitch in heavy building materials in the United States, and we start with ready-mix concrete. Many companies are now adopting an AI mission, an AI vision, an AI statement. Part of my job is managing those discussions: where does the company stand, and how does AI fit with what they run on-premises or in the cloud?

All of the dispatch software providers are adding AI. They are putting it on orders, on telematics, on material delivery, on production. But there is really no one focused on the conversational interactions coming into the contact center. When I saw that, I thought: “This is a huge opportunity.” I am lucky that Spitch decided to pick ready-mix concrete in the US. I am super excited to be at an international, cutting-edge AI company, putting a wrapper around untapped data. It gives us real value to offer producers: hard and soft benefits.

Walk into your dispatch office and ask: who is calling, and why are they calling? You are going to see people looking at the weather, the traffic, the dispatch screen, the demand graph, the driver screen. And you are not going to get simply an answer. Spitch answers that instantly, in simple bar charts. Everybody who has looked at it has said: “Yes, we want that.”

Speech analytics gives a provider a complete picture of the current situation. It’s like a photograph of what has been happening up to now. Any action taken based on that picture, whether optimizing internal processes, automating repetitive human interactions with a virtual assistant, or simply exporting transcripts to an existing data lake, is informed by the full spectrum of interactions, not by a random, statistically insignificant sample.

There’s no single answer. Some producers want full automation: placing or cancelling orders and answering calls after hours. Others take a people-first approach. Their virtual assistant might simply ask who’s calling and whether they have an order today, then pass the call to a dispatcher. That can still save 10 or 15 seconds per call, and the dispatcher knows who’s calling, which order they’re calling about, and which concrete mix they need before even answering. Approaches vary widely among both family-owned and multinational producers.

For me, the key message is keeping a human in the loop. Take a typical afternoon in a dispatch office: someone confirms the next day’s orders by phone, making the same calls over and over. Producers are asking us how to automate that. Automate where it makes business sense, and make sure escalation to a person is part of the solution. That’s part of every demo I give.

I am on my third dog, and I enjoy having dogs. I enjoy playing competitive tournament golf, and I am a certified snowboard instructor. I also enjoy going on expeditions on rivers with whitewater. I was an expedition Trip Leader for a private trip down the Grand Canyon once, and that was so much fun and life-changing. I like playing outside as much as possible, and working remotely gives me the opportunity to do that. I am also a lifelong learner with a growth mindset.