Breaking from the FreightTech AI pack: Companies make their case at TIA meeting
The presentations came during a Media Day at the TIA's annual Capital Ideas Conference, a day before the full launch of the largest gathering of freight brokers. One by one, nearly 20 companies laid out the capabilities of new or near-new technologies and capabilities they had launched to serve the 3PL industry.
While it was clear that the capabilities of generative AI are no longer the technology of the future and very much part of the present, it was just as obvious that the overlap of what many of these solutions do, which has always been a feature of technology products aimed at the supply chain, doesn't go away in the AI world. That's where the 'final mile' comes in, those small capabilities that the tech suppliers look to create to differentiate themselves from what is already becoming a crowded field.
For example, several presentations touted applications that would use AI to intake the never-ending stream of emails, text messages and phone calls a brokerage receives from drivers, other carrier employees or shippers. The new tools can use generative AI to formulate a response that meets the queries of the supply chain without consuming brokers' time, leaving them to more productive tasks. So far, there is no shortage of companies offering this service.
David Bell, the founder and CEO of CloneOps AI, whose company presented at the Media Day, said the unusual name of his startup – which launched its product in conjunction with the conference – came from the oft-heard wish that during times of worker overload, some of a company's more productive employees could be cloned.
'Your emails are stacking up, your phone calls are on hold, your voicemail is getting full, your texting is getting full, and you're a one person show trying to keep your head above water,' Bell said in an interview with FreightWaves, describing the situation that several companies face.
But with other companies offering similar AI products that take in communications and respond to them without human intervention when possible, the question to Bell was, how do you separate yourself from the pack? How does your last mile differ from that of others?
Bell spoke of his experience as the owner of Smith Cargo, a consolidator, and then the founder of Lean Solutions (which also presented at Media Day.)
But it wasn't just his background, Bell said. For example, he boasted of CloneOps' voice identification capabilities, which he said 'is going to prevent fraud right from the start.' If a call comes in from a 'fake carrier trying to get a load, it's going to identify if they're authorized to speak and if they're authorized to book a load on behalf of the carrier.'
The goal, Bell said, is to 'create a bad actors database of the voices that are actually stealing the loads.'
ParadeAI attended the conference but wasn't a presenter at TIA Media Day. However, its AI-driven offering is not duplicated by any of the companies that did present, as its capabilities involve using AI to provide what it calls capacity management.
ParadeAI, which founder and CEO Anthony Sutardja said launched in 2019, uses a variety of tools to develop a reservoir of information about carriers that AI then can use to provide information to brokers looking to secure capacity.
At its launch, Sutardja said, it used truck list emails to populate its data. 'We took the natural language processing technology that existed back then to start structuring it into available trucks for matching,' he said. 'That was one way of getting capacity,' he said.
With the addition of more FreightTech solutions being adopted by brokers, Sutardja said, all of them create further sources of capacity that can then be interpreted by AI to give a broker a look at available capacity that might be a match for the lane that is seeking trucking services.
The new features launched in conjunction with the TIA meeting are marketed under a product called CoDriver. The capabilities recently launched were described by Sutardja as a 'voice AI agent that can help have a conversation between the broker and carrier to discuss an available load, check if the carrier is qualified and check if it meets the load requirements.'
While capacity management capabilities are the core of ParadeAI's business, it also has a pricing product called Advantage.
ParadeAI and CloneOps both had booths on the TIA exhibition hall floor, which is dominated by FreightTech companies. CloneOps was also the sponsor of the conference's Wi-Fi; its brand marketing popped up whenever an attendee accessed that service.
OTR Solutions has multiple financial tools for the industry, including factoring and fuel cards. COO Grace Maher introduced OTR 365, which she called an 'always-on network of interconnected financial products delivering intelligent solutions and powerful technologies.' What this means for drivers getting paid, she said, is 'no more cutoff times for same-day funding, no more weekend or bank holiday delays.'
Pallet's AI solution is in the already crowded field of companies using AI to process and aid in what Jason Feng of the company's marketing team described as automation of 'any sort of repetitive workflow, including order entry, RFQ processing, track-and-trace and reconciliation.' Its product is called Copilot.
The role of AI 'agents,' essentially human-like robots with an element of a personality, came up several times during TIA Media Day. At TMS provider Revenova, the agent's name is Artimus, introduced earlier this year. Marketing manager Mike Marut said the main strength of AI agents is that they can be tailored to the capabilities of a brokerage. 'It's customized and configured to what you do in your operational processes, but it's going to be different from everybody else,' he said.
Michael Caney of Highway spoke about an upgrade to the company's visibility solution that combines it with the company's security validation, which is at the heart of Highway's rapid success in the market so far. It helps answer a key question that brokers need to answer to fight fraud: 'Are they [the carrier] within the geographic location of the load that they're looking at?'
One company whose AI-driven product didn't have any obvious matches was Qued. Based on the pitch from President Tom Curee, it also is focused on using AI to help manage the stream of communications, but its focus was on one particular task: appointments. 'Imagine all these different appointments that have to be scheduled,' he said. 'They're in web portals, they're in emails or phone calls.' The AI solution at Qued is designed to tackle that with new technology.
Crum & Foster rolled out new ways of accessing its TripExcess insurance offering that sells insurance to cover a high-value load whose value exceeds the coverage in a carrier or broker's insurance policies.
Fleetworks introduced a solution that involves AI-produced conversations that can take the place of human interaction with phones and email for more routine tasks. Its new product also involves an AI-driven tool that can speak multiple languages.
Freight Claims is a new company that will use AI and machine learning to produce automated workflows dealing with claims, which founder and CEO Mike Schember said was 'the last department to get any resources in any organization.'
Get Real Rates, according to its co-founder Omar Singh, is using automation to generate rate information, 'fast forwarding automation that I thought was going to happen years ago, but it's taken a little bit longer.'
Alfonso Quijano, CEO of Lean Solutions, introduced StudioQ. TalentQ is the first application under the StudioQ set of AI-driven solutions that Quijano said give its customers an 'unprecedented level of visibility to access talent.' It also aids in the onboarding process 'from start to finish, ensuring your new hire is fully prepared to thrive in their role,' Quijano said.
Greenscreens.ai CEO Dawn Favier, fresh off the company's announced planned acquisition by Triumph Capital (NASDAQ: TFIN), said her company will be adding an AI-driven product, Intuition. 'Pricing long-term freight contracts has always been a major challenge in the freight industry,' she said. Using AI and drawing on historical data, Intuition will build market forecasts on lanes out to 12 months in advance, greatly speeding up a broker's ability to respond to a longer-term RFP as opposed to the spot market.
Happy Robot is rolling out Bridge, 'a control panel to run the operations across your entire business,' Catherine Dean said in presenting the product. Bridge, she said, 'is like a connection point between your teams and your businesses, shared knowledge and task execution.'
Steve Kochan of HaulPay discussed his company's financing activities, which involve factoring and payments among other services, with a special focus on fighting fraud. He was presenting at Media Day because of the first update of the company's app and user interface in more than six years.
Among the presentations by so many new companies was a veteran: Infinity Software Solutions, a TMS provider in business for 25 years. CEO Josh Asbury said the company was taking a 'big swing' in introducing WorkerOS, which he described as 'unifying all the different data, all the different data streams that workers have, the different data pipelines, into a common pool of data.'
Another veteran company that presented was McLeod Software. Its new AI product is MPact.RespondAI. It was described as McLeod's first AI solution, and its functionality is targeted at what already looks like a crowded field: processing voluminous levels of all types of communication.
Rose Rocket's TMS has added its own human-named feature, Ted, to its TMS.AI system, which was introduced earlier this year. It's another entry into the battle for cleaning up communications like emails that pour into brokerages every day. 'You get reduced time spent on manual entry by up to 20%, and new users of Rose Rocket will onboard onto our system 70% faster,' field marketing manager Neena Salifu said of Ted.
David Ely, chief product officer at broker-focused Tai Software, used the word 'flexibility' to describe his company's new offering, which was introduced at the TIA. Tai believes, Ely said, that brokers are 'forced to work around preset work flows, fixed fields, static period logic, and it makes true automation impossible without costly development.' The flexibility he said is being built into Tai will 'let them define their business rules, trigger automated workloads and adapt the platform to fit their unique operations.'
Michael Davidian, the vice president of business operations at TrueNorth, introduced Loadie, its 'virtual dispatcher' that takes information posted to the company's load board and seeks to use AI to match it with a carrier. 'Our AI doesn't just wait,' Davidian said. 'It works to match loads with quality carriers in real time, and the broker can specify what type of carriers match to that broker's load. This can be based on authority compliance criteria, past relationships with that broker and a variety of other customizable factors.'
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The post Breaking from the FreightTech AI pack: Companies make their case at TIA meeting appeared first on FreightWaves.
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Washington Post
3 hours ago
- Washington Post
How the spy game will work when there's no place to hide
Aaron Brown was working as a CIA case officer in 2018 when he wrote a post for an agency blog warning about what he called 'gait recognition.' He cautioned his fellow officers that computer algorithms would soon be able to identify people not just by their faces, or fingerprints, or DNA — but by the unique ways they walked. Many of his colleagues, trained in the traditional arts of disguise and concealment, were skeptical. One called it 'threat porn.' But Brown's forecast was chillingly accurate. A study published in May reported that a model called FarSight, using gait, body and face recognition, was 83 percent accurate in verifying an individual at up to 1,000 meters, and was 65 percent accurate even when the face was obscured. 'It's hard to overstate how powerful that is,' Brown said. Brown's story illustrates a profound transformation that is taking place in the world of intelligence. For spies, there is literally no place to hide. Millions of cameras around the world record every movement and catalogue it forever. Every action leaves digital tracks that can be studied and linked with others. Your cellphone and social media accounts tell the world precisely who and where you are. Further, attempts at concealment can backfire in the digital age. An intelligence source told me that the CIA gave burner phones to a network of spies in a Middle Eastern country more than a decade ago and instructed them to turn the phones on only when sending operational messages. But the local security service had devised an algorithm that could identify 'anomalous' phones that were used infrequently. The network was exposed by its attempt at secrecy. 'The more you try to hide, the more you stand out,' Brown explained. He wouldn't discuss the Middle East case or any other operational details. But the lesson is obvious: If you don't have a cellphone or a social media profile these days, that could signal you're a spy or criminal who's trying to stay off the grid. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Brown, a wiry former Army Ranger and CIA counterterrorism officer, is one of a small group of ex-spies who are trying to reinvent American intelligence to survive in this age of 'ubiquitous technical surveillance,' or UTS. He launched a new company this year called Lumbra. Its goal is to build AI 'agents' that can find and assess — and act upon — data that reveals an adversary's intentions. Lumbra is one of nearly a dozen start-ups that I've examined over the past several months to explore where intelligence is headed in 2025. It's a dazzling world of new technology. One company uses data to identify researchers who may have connections to Chinese intelligence. Another interrogates big data systems the way an advertising company might, to identify patterns through what its founder calls 'ADINT.' A third uses a technology it calls 'Obscura' to bounce cellphone signals among different accounts so they can't be identified or intercepted. Most of these intelligence entrepreneurs are former CIA or military officers. They share a fear that the intelligence community isn't adapting fast enough to the new world of espionage. 'Technologically, the agency can feel like a sarcophagus when you see everything that's happening outside,' worries Edward Bogan, a former CIA officer. He now works with a nonprofit called 2430 Group — the number was an early CIA cover address in Washington — that tries to help technology companies protect their work from adversaries. The Trump administration recognizes this intelligence revolution, at least in principle. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said during confirmation hearings he wants to ramp up covert operations, with officers 'going places no one else can go and doing things no one else can do.' That's a commendable goal, but if the agency doesn't reinvent its tradecraft, Ratcliffe's bold talk may well fail. Traditional operations will only expose the CIA and its sources to greater risk. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement A CIA spokesperson said this week in response to a query: 'Today's digital environment poses as many opportunities as it does challenges. We're an adaptable agency, and it is well within the ingenuity and creativity of our officers to develop ways to navigate effectively in complex environments. In fact, we are exploiting many of the same technologies to recruit spies and steal information.' Brown takes hope from the work that younger CIA officers are doing to reimagine the spy business: 'Some of the agency's smartest people are working on these tradecraft problems from sunup to sundown, and they are coming up with unique solutions.' The CIA's technology challenge is a little-noted example of a transformation that's happening in every area of defense and security. Today, smart machines can outwit humans. I've written about the algorithm war that has revolutionized the battlefield in Ukraine, where no soldier is safe from drones and precision-guided missiles. We've just seen a similar demonstration of precision targeting in Israel's war against Iran. For soldiers and spies everywhere, following the old rules can get you killed. (Illustration by Raven Jiang/For The Washington Post) The art of espionage is thousands of years old. The Bible speaks of it, as do ancient Greek, Persian and Chinese texts. Through the ages, it has been based on two pillars: Spies operate in secret, masking who they are and what they're doing (call it 'cover'), and they use techniques to hide their movements and communications (call it 'tradecraft'). Modern technology has shattered both pillars. To recall the mystique of the CIA's old-school tradecraft, consider Antonio J. Mendez, the agency's chief of disguise in the 1980s. He described in a memoir how he created ingenious facial masks and other deceptions that could make someone appear to be a different race, gender, height and profile. Some of the disguises you see on 'The Americans' or 'Mission Impossible' use techniques developed by Mendez and his colleagues. The CIA's disguises and forgeries back then were like works of fine art. But the agency in its first few decades was also a technology pioneer — innovating on spy planes, satellite surveillance, battery technology and covert communications. Its tech breakthroughs were mostly secret systems, designed and built in-house. The Silicon Valley tech revolution shattered the agency's innovation model. Private companies began driving change and government labs were lagging. Seeing the disconnect, CIA Director George Tenet in 1999 launched the agency's own venture capital firm called 'In-Q-Tel' to connect with tech start-ups that had fresh ideas that could help the agency. In-Q-Tel's first CEO was Gilman Louie, who had previously been a video game designer. In-Q-Tel made some smart early investments, including in the software company Palantir and the weapons innovator Anduril. CIA Director George Tenet listens to a question posed by a member of the Senate Armed Services committee on Feb. 3, 2000, on Capitol Hill. (George Bridges/AFP/Getty Images) But the CIA's early attempts to create new tradecraft sometimes backfired. To cite one particularly disastrous example: The agency developed what seemed an ingenious method to communicate with its agents overseas using internet addresses that appeared to be news or hobby sites. Examples included an Iranian soccer site, a Rasta music page and a site for Star Wars fans, and dozens more, according to investigations by Yahoo News and Reuters. The danger was that if one agent was caught, the technology trick could be exposed — endangering scores of other agents. It was like mailing secret letters that could be traced to the same postbox — a mistake the CIA had made with Iran years before. Iran identified the internet ruse and began taking apart CIA networks around 2010. China soon did the same thing. The agency's networks in both countries were largely destroyed from 2010 to 2012. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement In a 2012 speech during his stint as CIA director, Gen. David H. Petraeus warned that the fundamentals of spying had changed: 'We have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy. … Every byte left behind reveals information about location, habits, and, by extrapolation, intent and probable behavior.' But machines moved faster than humans in the spy world. That's what I learned in my weeks of on-the-record discussions with former CIA officers working to develop the espionage tools of the future. They describe a cascade of commercial innovations — instant search, mobile phones, cheap cameras, limitless accessible data — that came so quickly the CIA simply couldn't adapt at the speed of change. Duyane Norman was one of the CIA officers who tried to move the system. In 2014, he returned from overseas to take a senior operations job. The agency was struggling then to recover from the collapse of its networks in Iran and China, and the fallout from Edward Snowden's revelation of CIA and NSA secrets. Norman remembers thinking that 'the foundations of our tradecraft were being disrupted,' and the agency needed to respond. Norman convinced his superiors that in his next overseas assignment, he should try to create what came to be called 'the station of the future,' which would test new digital technology and ideas that could improve offensive and defensive operations. This experiment had some successes, he told me, in combating surveillance and dropping outmoded practices. But the idea of a 'station,' usually based in an embassy, was still a confining box. 'You're the CEO of Kodak,' Norman says he warned Director Gina Haspel when he retired in 2019, recalling the camera and film company that dominated the industry before the advent of digital photography. Kodak missed the chance to change, and the world passed it by. When I asked Norman to explain the CIA's resistance to change, he offered another analogy. 'If Henry Ford had gone to transportation customers and asked what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses.' 'That's what the CIA has been trying to build. Faster horses.' The intelligence community's problem was partly that it didn't trust technology that hadn't been created by the government's own secret agencies. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Mike Yeagley, a data scientist who runs a company called discovered that in 2016 when he was working with commercial mobile phone location data. His business involved selling advertisers the data generated by phone apps. As a cellphone user moves from work to home — visiting friends, stores, doctors and every other destination — his device reveals his interests and likely buying habits. Yeagley happened to be studying refugee problems back then, and he wondered if he could find data that might be useful to NGOs that wanted to help Syrians fleeing the civil war into Turkey. He bought Syrian cellphone data — cheap, because it had few commercial applications. Then, on a whim, he began looking for devices that dwelled near Fort Bragg, North Carolina — where America's most secret Special Operations forces are based — and later appeared in Syria. And guess what? He found a cluster of Fort Bragg phones pinging around an abandoned Lafarge cement plant in the northeast Syrian desert. Bingo! The cement factory was the headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command task force that was running America's war against the Islamic State. It was supposed to be one of the most secret locations on the planet. When I visited several times over the past decade as an embedded journalist, I wasn't allowed to walk more than 50 yards without an escort. And there it was, lighting up a grid on a commercial advertising data app. Yeagley shared that information with the military back in 2016 — and they quickly tightened phone security. Commanders assumed that Yeagley must have hacked or intercepted this sensitive data. 'I bought it,' Yeagley told them. Even the military's security experts didn't seem to realize that mobile phones had created a gold mine of information that was being plundered by advertisers but largely ignored by the government. Thanks to advice from Yeagley and many other experts, data analytics is now a growing source of intelligence. Yeagley calls it 'ADINT,' because it uses techniques developed by the advertising industry. Who would have imagined that ad salespeople could move faster than secret warriors? (Illustration by Raven Jiang/For The Washington Post) Glenn Chafetz had been station chief in three countries when he returned to Langley in 2018 to take an assignment as the first 'Chief of Tradecraft' in the operations directorate. It was the agency's latest attempt to adapt to the new world, succeeding the Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance Working Group, which in turn had replaced the CCTV Working Group. 'People realized that the problem wasn't just cameras, but payment systems, mobile apps, WiFi hubs — any technology that produced data that lived permanently,' Chafetz recalls. But there was still a lack of understanding and resistance from many officers who had joined the CIA when there were no cellphones, digital cameras or Google. For the older generation, tradecraft meant executing 'surveillance detection routes' to expose and evade trackers. Case officers had all gone through field training to practice how to detect surveillance and abort agent meetings that might be compromised. They met their assets only if they were sure they were 'black,' meaning unobserved. But when cameras were everywhere, recording everything, such certainty was impossible. Chafetz lead a team that tried to modernize tradecraft until he retired in 2019. But he remembers that an instructor in the agency's training program admonished him, 'New officers still need to learn the basics.' The instructor didn't seem to understand that the 'basics' could compromise operations. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement The tradecraft problem wasn't just pervasive surveillance, but the fact that data existed forever. In the old days, explains Chafetz, 'If you didn't get caught red-handed, you didn't get caught.' But now, hidden cameras could monitor a case officer's meandering route to a dead drop site and his location, long before and after. His asset might collect the drop a week later, but his movements would be recorded, before and after, too. Patterns of travel and behavior could be tracked and analyzed for telltale anomalies. Even when spies weren't caught red-handed, they might be caught. The CIA's default answer to tradecraft problems, for decades, was greater reliance on 'nonofficial cover' officers, known as NOCs. They could pose as bankers or business consultants, say, rather than as staffers in U.S. embassies. But NOCs became easier to spot, too, in the age of social media and forever-data. They couldn't just drop into a cover job. They needed an authentic digital history including things like a 'LinkedIn' profile that had no gaps and would never change. For some younger CIA officers, there was a fear that human espionage might be nearly impossible. The 'station of the future' hadn't transformed operations. 'Cover' was threadbare. Secret communications links had been cracked. The skeptics worried that the CIA model was irreparably broken. Separator visual After all my conversations with veteran CIA officers, I've concluded that the agency needs an entirely new tool kit. Younger officers inside recognize that change is necessary. Pushing this transformation from the outside are scores of tech-savvy officers who have recently left the CIA or the military. It's impossible at this stage to know how many of these ventures will prove successful or important; some won't pan out. The point is the urgent need to innovate. Let's start with cellular communications. That's a special worry after Chinese intelligence penetrated deep inside the major U.S. telecommunications companies using a state-sponsored hacking group known as 'Salt Typhoon.' A solution is offered by a company called Cape, which sells customers, in and out of government, a mobile network that can disappear from the normal cellular grid and protect against other vulnerabilities. Cape was founded in 2022 by John Doyle, who served as a U.S. Army Special Forces sergeant from 2003 to 2008 and then worked for Palantir. His 'Obscura' technology bounces mobile phone identifiers among thousands of customers so it's impossible to trace any of them. He calls his tactic 'opportunistic obfuscation.' One of the most intriguing private intelligence companies is Strider Technologies, founded in 2019 by twin brothers Greg and Eric Levesque and chief data officer Mike Brown. They hired two prominent former CIA officers: Cooper Wimmer, who served in Athens, Vienna, Baghdad and Peshawar, and other locations; and Mark Pascale, a former station chief in both Moscow and Beijing. The company also recruited David Vigneault, former head of Canadian intelligence. Strider describes itself as a 'modern-day economic security agency.' To help customers secure their innovation and talent, it plucks the secrets of adversaries like China and Russia that steal U.S. commercial information. China is vulnerable because it has big open-source databases of its own, which are hard to protect. Using this data, Strider can analyze Chinese organizations and their employees; it can study Chinese research data, and how it was obtained and shared; it can analyze the 'Thousand Talents' programs China uses to lure foreigners; it can track the contacts made by those researchers, at home and abroad; and it can identify connections with known Chinese intelligence organizations or front companies. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Eric Levesque explained to me how Strider's system works. Imagine that a software engineer is applying to work for an international IT company. The engineer received a PhD from a leading American university. What research did he conduct there? Was it shared with Chinese organizations? What research papers has he published? Who in China has read or cited them? What Chinese companies (or front companies) has he worked for? Has this prospective employee touched any branch of the Chinese civil-military conglomerate? Strider can operate inside what China calls the 'Great Firewall' that supposedly protects its data. I didn't believe this was possible until Levesque gave me a demonstration. On his computer screen, I could see the links, from a researcher in the West, to a 'Thousand Talents' program, to a Ministry of State Security front company. It turns out that China hasn't encrypted much of its data — because the authorities want to spy on their own citizens. China is now restricting more data, but Levesque says Strider hasn't lost its access. Separator visual We've entered a new era where AI models are smarter than human beings. Can they also be better spies? That's the conundrum that creative AI companies are exploring. Scale AI sells a product called 'Donovan,' named after the godfather of the CIA, William J. 'Wild Bill' Donovan. The product can 'dig into all available data to rapidly identify trends, insights, and anomalies,' says the company's website. Alexandr Wang, the company's founding CEO (who was just poached by Meta), explains AI's potential impact by quoting J. Robert Oppenheimer's statement that nuclear weapons produced 'a change in the nature of the world.' William (Wild Bill) Donovan, center, who headed the U.S. Office of Strategic Service during World War II, is greeted by Maj. General C. L. Chennault, second from the left, in Hong Kong on Jan. 3, 1950. (AP) Vannevar Labs, another recent start-up, is creating tools to 'influence adversary behavior and achieve strategic outcomes.' Its website explains: 'We develop sophisticated collection, obfuscation, and ML (machine learning) techniques to provide assured access to mission relevant data.' The company's name evokes men Bush, an MIT engineer who headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, which oversaw all major U.S. research projects during World War II, including the launch of the Manhattan Project. the company launched in March by Brown, seeks to create what he describes as a 'central nervous system' that will connect the superintelligence of future AI models with software 'agents.' After leaving the CIA in 2021, Brown met with Sam Altman, the founder of Open AI, to refine his thinking. To describe what agentic AI can do, he offers this hypothetical: 'We can find every AI researcher, read all the papers they've ever written, and analyze any threats their research may pose for the United States.' Human spies could never be so adept. 'No one said we have to collect intelligence only from humans,' Brown tells me. 'When a leader makes a decision, someone in the system has to take a step that's observable in the data we can collect.' Brown's AI agents will create a plan and then build and use tools that can gather the observable information. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Brown imagines what he calls a 'Case Officer in a Box.' Conceptually, it would be a miniaturized version of an agentic system running a large language model, like Anthropic's Claude. As an offline device, it could be carried in a backpack by anyone and left anywhere. It would speak every language and know every fact ever published. It could converse with an agent, asking questions that elicit essential information. 'Did you work in the Iranian weaponization program?' our Case Officer in a Box might ask a hypothetical Iranian recruit. 'Where was your lab? In the Shariati Complex? Okay, then, was it in the Shahid Karami Building or the Imam Khomeini building? Did you work on neutron triggers for a bomb? How close to completion was your research? Where did you last see the prototype neutron triggers? Show me on a map, please.' The digital case officer will make a great movie, but it's probably unrealistic. 'No one is going to put their life in the hands of a bot,' cautioned Wimmer, a fabled CIA recruiter. The agent would suspect that the AI system was really a trick by his own country's spies. Brown agrees that recruiting a human spy will probably always require another human being who can build the necessary bond of trust. But once that bond is achieved, he believes technology will enhance a spy's impact in astonishing ways. Here's the final, essential point. Human spies in the field will become rare. Occasionally, a piece of information will be so precious that the CIA will risk the life of one of its officers, and the life of an agent, to collect the intelligence in person. But that kind of face-to-face spying will be the exception. The future of espionage is written in zeros and ones. The CIA will survive as a powerful spy agency only if it makes a paradigm shift.
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- Business Wire
Randy Poole Joins RYZE Claim Solutions as Executive Vice President of Operations
TAMPA, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--RYZE Claim Solutions, a leading full-service claims management business, today announced that Randy Poole has joined as Executive Vice President of Operations, assuming a key role as RYZE continues to grow both organically and through targeted acquisitions. Randy Poole has joined RYZE Claim Solutions as Executive Vice President of Operations. Share Poole has extensive experience in claims management and the insurance industry. That includes more than 18 years with Liberty Mutual Insurance, including 12 years as Vice President of Property and Catastrophe Claims. At Liberty Mutual, he led the property and commercial desk claims/specialty operations, and collaboratively built and executed a multi-billion dollar claims strategy. Earlier in his career, Poole also worked in various capacities for State Farm Insurance. He holds a bachelor's degree in business and finance from the University of Texas at Austin, and a law degree from the South Texas College of Law in Houston. 'RYZE is continuing to grow nationally, including our acquisitions earlier this year of Leading Edge Claims and Acorn Claims,' RYZE Executive Chairman Tony Grippa said. 'We are extremely fortunate to have Randy Poole join our senior leadership team. He will play a critical role in ensuring that our operations continue to provide optimal service for our clients and their policy holders. That includes making full use RYZEQAi, our proprietary AI tool that is greatly improving the accuracy of claims for our clients.' 'RYZE has a great team in place, and I'm excited to be a part of it,' Poole said. 'My focus will be on looking for ways to contribute to the continued growth of the business, and to strengthen our performance for our customers. That includes making sure we're taking advantage of RYZEQAi and other technological innovations.' About RYZE Claim Solutions RYZE Claim Solutions is a national provider of claims services for insurance carriers and managing general agents. Leveraging artificial intelligence and proprietary technology, RYZE delivers industry-leading service. Its latest innovation, RYZEQAI, is an AI-powered quality assurance tool that enhances accuracy by minimizing manual errors and optimizing workflows. RYZE offers a full suite of outsourcing solutions, including field and virtual adjusting, third-party administration, alternative dispute resolution, large loss management, and flood claims services. Built on core principles of honesty and integrity, RYZE is committed to delivering exceptional service. At RYZE, 'Reputations Matter, People Matter, Results Matter.'
