Ever since the moving industry started to embrace various digital management systems, the pain of constant data re-entry has gradually risen to being nearly unbearable. At first, it was about copy/pasting data from BOLs and pre-advices into one’s move management system. Then, large industry bookers rolled out their systems and mandated that movers update their shipments in them. And to make it worse, virtually every mover uses multiple systems for managing various parts of a shipment lifecycle; I’m talking about surveys, inventories, labeling, job management, accounting, documents management, etc.

It doesn’t sound reasonable, because the magic word API should have solved the problem. For starters, if system providers don’t set up peer-to-peer integrations using each others’ APIs, their respective systems continue to ignore each other. If the software vendors do get forced to integrate, then rarely is their data exchange flow suitable for their joint client base. The issue isn’t technical: a data flow is a reflection of specific company processes, staff, habits, and budgets. Human personal traits are a handful to start with. Bridging between unique individuals and various move management, EPR, and CRM systems (and the personalities behind them) has rendered the API-based integration approach impractical. Throw in the costs and egos involved, and don’t be surprised at the current state of the data exchange in our industry. And, from our experience, it’s the same in other logistics related industries.

As a provider of specialized technological solutions for movers, we hit the wall when it came to integrating with other industry systems. And now we see how any mover can overcome what seemed like an unsurmountable obstacle using AI. Put it in layman’s terms, we learned to apply AI for something that individual technology solutions and their providers and users struggle to accomplish: personalized, friendly and sensible information exchange. And no, I’m not referring to ChatGPT-driven group therapy sessions. I’m talking about Claude and Perplexity for system integrations.

This solution is where AI engines like Claude or Perplexity shine. They allow us to set up data exchange workflows between an individual company’s CRM and our inventory and survey solutions according to that company’s processes. And the caveat here is that integration doesn’t amount to any development or good will of the system providers involved. Simply speaking, if company A dispatches inventory and bingo jobs to their pickup and delivery crews in the evening, an AI task can do just that and then bring the inventories and the bingo sheets back the following evening. Company B would rather dispatch an inventory job to a driver when the job’s assigned to it; their AI integration task will do that.

Humans are great at solving problems, but not at copying data between systems at 10:00 PM. AI, on the other hand, is all about inferring patterns and then repeating the same sequence of actions over and over again. And this emotionless stamina is just perfect for system integration because copy/pasting even 10 pieces of data from a CRM to an inventory system per job, even if one has 10 jobs a day, grows very tiring and therefore error prone very quickly.

How about legacy, non-browser-based systems? Not a problem: all of these systems can produce Excel files with surveys and jobs to dispatch to the appropriate crews and surveyors. An AI task can turn these Excel files into jobs in our inventory and survey system and then download the data back to a computer where an automated task can be used to pick up the files and move them to an appropriate legacy system folder.

And then, there are Google Spreadsheet-based movers who don’t even have a CRM. It turns out that Perplexity and Claude have seamless integrations with Google everything (meaning Sheets, Docs and Drive). It was pretty amazing to hear a second generation mover explaining to me what they’ve done with it and having upgraded to Perplexity Enterprise as a way to prevent their data from being used or retained.

Can movers set up these AI integration skills and tasks on their own? Absolutely! Those who need a helping hand can rely on our assistance. Just keep in mind that we don’t get involved unless our systems are ;) Relying on system expertise does matter because AI isn’t cheap and it takes real working knowledge to set up the tasks in the most efficient manner.

I can even tell you what’s coming next: using AI to speed up data transfer from documents and images into our systems. Once the data is captured, professionals can do wonders with it!