Louisiana company using AI to improve employees’ lives. It’s changing international shipping.

Residents of Louisiana are used to seeing ships on the Mississippi River. What they might not know is where the ships are going, what they’re doing, or the logistics behind how they will get to where they’re going. 

That’s where a company like Tricon Steamship Agency comes in. Located in Gonzales, Tricon acts as an intermediary between companies, ships, and vendors to make sure everyone knows what’s happening, when it’s happening — and that everyone gets paid on time.

International steamboat shipping is a complicated industry full of tedious details. In 2021, Mike Brown, CEO of Tricon, confronted a problem. He constantly had to change the company’s internal processes based on the tech that was available and that the company could afford.

“There was no one end-all product that we could use,” Brown said.

Instead, they had to use a patchwork of multiple programs, scattering their databases and storage. When juggling all of this and trying to keep the elements together, he said, an organization is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. That realization led to a decision for the company to turn to artificial intelligence.

Since late 2022, Tricon has integrated AI into its systems — creating and streamlining tasks like invoicing and communicating with clients. For less than $6,000 a year, Brown and his team have worked with Angela Hood, founder and CEO of ThisWay Global, to create a unique system using IBM watsonx Orchestrate. The new system is working for Tricon.

For example, forms that used to take each onboard agent four hours per week to complete can be automatically completed in 30 minutes.

The ships transport hundreds of commodities every day.

“If the ships aren’t there, you’re not getting anything,” said Don Maney, Operations Manager of Tricon.

The ships carry more than some might imagine — not just food products like corn or soybeans but the raw materials used to create many of the products people love along with some of the products themselves. If you ordered a table from Ikea, it might be in a container on one of those ships.

At Tricon, Brown manages 15 employees, some of which are second-generation agents. Not only have they had multiyear careers in the industry, so did their fathers.

The job of ship agent is instrumental. Simply put, they make sure everyone’s expectations are met, but that requires processing a huge amount of data behind the scenes and relies on years of built-up institutional knowledge about ships, regulations, logistics and the many different systems that are used to keep track of all of it. This all comes from experience.

“It would take people years before they were really useful to me within the industry,” said Brown, who runs a 24/7 operation.

Things never stop, but people are fallible. They need breaks, vacations, and sometimes they move on for different opportunities. Before AI integration, if one of his employees retired or left the company, it would take years to replace them fully.

When Brown approached Maney about using AI at his job early this year, Maney’s first thought was “Man, is this going to take me out?”

He’s not alone when it comes to worries about artificial intelligence. AI is a buzzy topic that most people seem not to understand fully, but the news is replete with examples of AI’s potential to replace humans in tasks like writing or creating art. It’s even changing the way college professors assign and evaluate classwork.

Brown had his initial hesitations too. He’s old school. He’s seen “Terminator,” but the result of the integration at Tricon made Maney’s job better.

“It’s a shame that this was not introduced into the shipping industry until now,” he said.

Before AI integration, his job was prone to human error which could mean someone doesn’t get paid on time or a company has to spend more money because they make decisions based on incomplete or incorrect information. Now, even for new employees, forms and processes are standardized and automated, and if someone inputs something that doesn’t look quite right, the system can flag it.

With AI, Maney and his colleagues spend less time working on these tasks and are freed up to work on other things only humans can do — like improving customer relationships.

Many people have hesitations about bringing AI into the workplace or using it at all. Angela Hood, CEO of the AI company that helped Tricon integrate their new system, has heard it all. She said that states in the South are more reluctant to try integrating AI, but it’s more common than you might think.

“Most of the AI that companies are using right now, you have on your phone,” said Hood. “You have been experiencing that since you started using Google Maps or if you ever use Uber or if you ever order food online.”

These apps are backed by AI, and most people don’t give them a second thought.

“But if a person does not learn how to work with AI and work with automation,” Hood continued, “They are putting themselves at risk for promotion in their career or stability in their career.”

The goal in incorporating AI, Brown said, wasn’t to eliminate staff, but to make Tricon a place people would actively want to work. This reasoning is in line with what experts like Andrew Schwarz professor of information systems at LSU who has studied AI in workplaces say is a positive direction of AI in the workplace and what the presidents of organizations he has interviewed in his research are actually using AI for.

“People think that it’s all of a sudden, like this big flash in the pan,” he said. “The truth is that this phenomenon of AI has really been studied for over 80 years.”

AI isn’t foolproof.

It’s trained on data that humans provide which means it’s susceptible to human bias. It’s a tool like electricity or the internet. It can be used for good or for bad, but it will change the game. That’s why experts like Schwarz advocate for “AI from cradle to grave” which means everyone should be learning how AI works and doesn’t work — and the pros and cons to using it to make more informed decisions.

At Tricon, the long-term goal is to continue to use AI to simplify international shipping in an industry that has so many players that it’s easy for things to go off the rails.

“Ultimately, it’s just going to create more readability and productivity here on the river which is going to result in more shipments and an impact on our economy,” said Brown.