On an episode of TPM Today, host Eric Johnson, senior technology editor at the Journal of Commerce, interviews Sushant Ramen, founder and CEO of Pallet, about why the overwhelming majority of AI agent projects fail in logistics. Ramen argues the culprit is 'context scattering' — AI vendors who don't understand the thousands of undocumented 'tribal rules' inside freight forwarding and 3PL operations. Pallet's approach captures that organizational memory, then automates document-heavy workflows like commercial invoices, packing lists, ISFs, and container track-and-trace. The conversation covers the MIT study finding 95% of enterprise AI initiatives fail, how shippers and 3PLs use agents differently, the 'AWSification' of logistics labor, and how to vet AI vendors with blunt domain questions and forced tests.
On TPM Today, host Eric Johnson, senior technology editor at the Journal of Commerce, sits down with Sushanth Raman, Co-Founder and CEO of Pallet, to unpack why roughly 95% of enterprise AI agent initiatives fail and how Pallet aims to be the exception. Raman argues that the missing ingredient is 'tribal knowledge' — the thousands of undocumented business rules buried inside every freight forwarder, 3PL and shipper operation. Pallet captures that context, chunks it into 'organizational memories,' and only then automates document-heavy workflows like commercial invoices, packing lists, ISFs, bills of lading and container track-and-trace, claiming 97-98% accuracy and real EBITDA improvement for customers.
Nevis is a New York-based startup building the first unified AI platform for wealth management. Founded in 2024 by three former Revolut leaders, it automates the back-office work that eats up to 80% of a financial advisor's day - meeting prep, client follow-ups, account opening and ongoing service - so advisors can spend their time with clients instead of paperwork. The company emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $40M in total funding from Sequoia, ICONIQ and Ribbit Capital, and already supports RIAs managing more than $50 billion in assets.
Talal Naseem Janjua is a growth and product operator working at the seam where payments, analytics, and behavior meet. He is Head of Growth at Ace Money Transfer, a UK-regulated remittance company, after building growth and product functions at two of Pakistan's biggest digital-finance players, JazzCash and Zindigi. His specialty is turning channel planning, advanced analytics, and automation into measurable movement in the numbers that matter.
Mimica is a London- and New York-based process intelligence company that records how people actually work - every click and keystroke - and turns that raw activity into end-to-end process maps. Those maps double as a roadmap for automation and, increasingly, as the training context that lets enterprise AI agents operate reliably in the real world. Founded in 2018 by Tuhin Chakraborty and Raphael Holca-Lamarre out of Entrepreneur First, Mimica serves over 30 large enterprises, including multiple Fortune 500s, and raised a $26.2M Series B in September 2025.
William Sankey is the co-founder, CEO and Head of Product of Northspyre, a cloud intelligence platform that has helped manage more than $175 billion in real estate development projects. A Yale- and Harvard-trained developer who once helped run the billion-dollar Madison Square Garden renovation, he taught himself to code on nights and weekends to kill the spreadsheet drudgery he saw everywhere in the industry. That side project became Northspyre, which he founded in 2017 and has since grown on more than $32 million in venture funding.
Josh Gruenstein is the co-founder and CEO of Tutor Intelligence, an MIT CSAIL spinout building AI-powered robots that work alongside people in American factories and warehouses. He leases robots by the hour instead of selling them, betting that fleet-scale learning, not bigger algorithms, is what finally puts a robot in every factory. In December 2025 the company raised a $34M Series A led by Union Square Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $42M.
Federico Viticci is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, the Italy-based Apple publication he started in 2009 at age 21. He is best known for his book-length annual iOS and iPadOS reviews, his pioneering, almost evangelical insistence on using the iPad as his primary computer, and his deep work on Apple's Shortcuts automation. He co-hosts the AppStories podcast and several Relay FM shows including Connected, and runs the membership community Club MacStories.
Ryan Avent is an American economics writer and author who spent 15 years at The Economist, six of them writing the magazine's flagship Free Exchange column. He wrote The Wealth of Humans (2016), a widely discussed argument that automation, globalization and a productive elite are creating a glut of labor that breaks the old social contract of work. He now runs portfolio communications at the investment fund Select Equity Group, writes the Substack newsletter The Bellows, and has a book on belief and the fate of societies forthcoming from Yale University Press.
Freshworks is a cloud-based business software company that builds easy-to-use customer service, IT service management and CRM tools for companies that found legacy enterprise software too complicated and too expensive. Founded in Chennai in 2010 as Freshdesk, it became the first India-born SaaS company to list on Nasdaq in 2021 and now serves tens of thousands of customers worldwide with an AI assistant, Freddy, woven through its products.
Zapier is the automation platform that connects more than 8,000 apps so people can build workflows - called Zaps - without writing code. Founded in 2011 by Wade Foster, Bryan Helmig and Mike Knoop, the fully remote company has grown from a Y Combinator side project into a roughly $5 billion business serving millions of users, and it is now reorienting around AI agents that don't just move data between apps but make decisions inside the workflow.
Monday.com is a publicly traded Israeli SaaS company (NASDAQ: MNDY) that builds a Work OS platform used by 245,000+ organizations globally. Its flagship products include Monday CRM, Monday Dev, and Monday WorkOS — a suite of customizable tools for sales, project management, and team collaboration. Founded in 2012, the company has grown from an internal Wix.com tool to a $1B+ ARR business with AI-powered agents, workflow automation, and deep integrations with 200+ enterprise tools.
NetSuite is the world's first cloud ERP and CRM platform, founded in 1998 by Evan Goldberg and now owned by Oracle. Trusted by 43,000+ organizations across 220 countries, NetSuite unifies financials, CRM, e-commerce, HR, and supply chain in a single cloud-native suite — making it the go-to business operating system for companies scaling from startup to enterprise.
Nimble CRM is a relationship-focused customer relationship management platform built for small businesses and teams. Founded by CRM pioneer Jon Ferrara — the co-founder of GoldMine Software — Nimble integrates deeply with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace to automatically enrich contact records, manage sales pipelines, and enable AI-powered prospecting. With transparent single-plan pricing at $24.90/user/month, Nimble positions itself as the smart, simple alternative to complex enterprise CRM systems, serving 10,000+ customers worldwide.
Nutshell is an all-in-one CRM and growth platform built for B2B small and mid-sized businesses that are tired of overpaying for software they barely use. Founded in 2009 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Nutshell combines sales pipeline management, email marketing, and customer engagement tools into a single subscription — with free live support on every plan. Acquired by digital marketing agency WebFX in 2022, Nutshell now serves over 5,000 companies across 50 countries, competing against industry giants like Salesforce and HubSpot by doing less, but doing it better.
Pipedrive is a sales-first CRM built by salespeople, for salespeople. Founded in 2010 in Tallinn, Estonia, and now headquartered in New York, Pipedrive gives small and mid-sized businesses a visual, activity-based pipeline that keeps deals moving. With over 100,000 companies across 179 countries using the platform, Pipedrive became a $1.5 billion unicorn in 2020 after a majority investment from Vista Equity Partners. Its philosophy is simple: salespeople should spend less time in software and more time selling.
ActiveCampaign is a Chicago-based marketing automation platform that helps over 180,000 businesses in 170+ countries connect with their customers through email marketing, CRM, SMS, and AI-powered automation. Founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom - who bootstrapped it solo for 13 years before raising $360M - the company reached a $3B valuation in 2021 and now generates $250M+ in annual recurring revenue. Its platform is particularly strong for small and mid-sized businesses that need sophisticated automation without enterprise-level complexity or cost.
Bitrix24 is an all-in-one online workspace that bundles CRM, project management, HR, communication, and AI automation into a single platform. Launched in 2012 and used by over 15 million organizations in 16 languages, it is the only major CRM in the world that prices per organization rather than per user - a structural bet that has made it a go-to for SMBs and growing teams that refuse to pay headcount taxes to their software stack.
Ayman Sayed is President and CEO of BMC Software, the $2.3-billion enterprise software company serving 86% of the Forbes Global 50. He joined BMC in 2019 after senior roles at CA Technologies (President and Chief Product Officer) and Cisco (SVP, leading 2,500+ engineers). Under his tenure, BMC pivoted toward AI-driven IT automation under the 'Autonomous Digital Enterprise' framework, and in 2024 he announced a landmark split of BMC into two independent companies - one focused on mainframe software and one on digital services management.
Nanonets is a San Francisco-based AI company that turns messy, unstructured documents - invoices, receipts, contracts, claims - into clean, structured data that flows directly into systems like SAP and Salesforce. Founded in 2017 by Sarthak Jain and Prathamesh Juvatkar, the company builds OCR and deep-learning agents that automate the dull back-office work nobody wants to do.
Augment builds Augie, an AI teammate purpose-built for logistics. The San Francisco company automates the phone calls, emails, portal logins, and back-office workflows that bog down freight brokers, shippers, and carriers - and has raised $110M in under a year to scale it.
BigPanda is an AIOps platform that uses machine learning to correlate noisy IT alerts from hundreds of monitoring tools into actionable incidents, helping enterprise operations teams detect, triage and resolve outages faster. Founded in 2012 and based in Mountain View / Redwood City, it serves large enterprises including Intel, PayPal, Workday and Gap.
Celera is an Alameda-based analog semiconductor company using AI to automate the historically artisanal craft of analog IC design. Its ChipHUB platform combines proprietary machine-learning agents with decades of analog expertise to deliver custom analog and mixed-signal chips up to 10x faster than legacy vendors. In March 2025, Celera became the first company to sample an analog IC entirely designed by autonomous software.
Cellares is the first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) for cell therapy. Its Cell Shuttle - a fully automated, high-throughput platform roughly the size of a small conference room - replaces a warren of manual labs with one box that can run 16 patient batches in parallel, cutting labor and facility footprint by about 90 percent.
Clutch is a digital origination platform built specifically for credit unions. It powers loan, deposit and business account opening - plus AI lending and collections assistants - for 150+ credit unions across the U.S., letting member-owned institutions move at fintech speed without rebuilding their core systems.
Copper is the CRM built natively for Google Workspace. It lives inside Gmail, Calendar and Drive, automatically captures contacts and conversations, and helps agencies, consultancies and small businesses run relationships and projects from one place instead of stitching together five tools.
DuploCloud is a San Jose-based DevOps automation platform that turns plain-English application requirements into production-ready, compliance-aware cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure and GCP. Founded by ex-Microsoft Azure engineer Venkat Thiruvengadam, it aims to give Main Street IT the hyperscale automation patterns once locked inside Big Tech.
Evinced is an AI-powered digital accessibility platform that helps engineering teams find, fix, and prevent accessibility defects across web and mobile apps. Founded by ex-Oracle execs in 2018, it sells to enterprise developers and counts six of the ten largest US and UK banks among its customers.
Lob is a San Francisco-based SaaS company that turns direct mail into programmable infrastructure. Through APIs and an automation platform, marketers and developers send personalized postcards, letters, checks, and self-mailers at scale, with built-in address verification and a nationwide print delivery network.
Pallet is a San Francisco AI startup building an 'AI workforce' for the logistics industry. Its flagship product, CoPallet, automates back-office freight workflows - order entry, quoting, document parsing, portal updates - that have historically required armies of human operators. Founded in 2020 by ex-Retool engineer Sushanth Raman, the company serves freight brokers, 3PLs, warehouses and carriers including STG Logistics, Mallory Alexander, Knight, Swift and Lineage.