McLeod Software got its start 40 years ago when computers were just becoming the norm in offices. The company started from scratch, writing software that is now in what CEO Tom McLeod likes to call the “third startup phase.”
The trucking software provider started over from 2000 to 2004, redesigning its software from the ground up, and is now in the process of a third rewrite.
The driver behind that is none other than the biggest hype across every industry right now: artificial intelligence.
McLeod said, just like computers, AI is allowing people to do more in less time.
“It's not a technology to be afraid of, and it's very important to get involved in because your competitors are learning, they're using, they're getting more productive. They're doing things to make their whole operation more efficient,” McLeod said Monday at McLeod Software UC2025. “I just want to take a moment and encourage you to get all your people involved in some way, learning what AI can do and what it can't do.”
A bandwagon worth the hype
McLeod has been implementing AI within its own operations.
McLeod said the company has been using it in its internal database and has seen improvements in its support resolution times. The company is also working to make it available on its customer portal, where customers can get answers via an AI engine. It’s also used in accounting as well as a notetaker in meetings.
One of the top areas where the company has experienced improvements by using AI is in research and development, McLeod said.
“Our developers say they're getting an extra two or three hours of work done a day, which is speeding up our development,” he said. “We actually got more in this last release (Version 25.2) than we expected because of this real productivity increase.”
Part of that release is McLeod’s new AI tool, RespondAI.
RespondAI
McLeod said fleets need to be more productive to offset the negative effects of an ongoing three-and-a-half-year freight rate recession.
The answer, he said, is AI.
Nine AI vendors were present at the McLeod user conference held this year in Aurora, Colorado. While McLeod partners with those vendors to offer its customers certified AI solutions, the company has its own AI, including the recent launch of RespondAI.
The first application of RespondAI, McLeod said, is the ability to turn an email into an order, and the company is working to add more attachment capabilities for processing those orders.
The second function is one of the most common things done manually: responding to rate requests. It recommends a rate, formats a response, and allows the user to send or edit. It will also keep a record of quotes and provide a report card of those won and lost—an insight that requires too much manual work for most companies to keep track of.
The third functionality is responding to requests for information from drivers, speeding up response times.
“RespondAI does more than just bring AI to our customers. It brings McLeod into the inbox,” said Doug Schrier, vice president of growth and special projects at McLeod. “It integrates McLeod TMS data into the inbox, and it provides something that, when I was operationally running a trucking and brokerage company, I would have loved to have, which was analytics of my people's inboxes.”
Schrier said it offers insights such as average response time to customers, drivers, and third-party partners. It can also highlight how much money was lost by not responding to quote requests left unopened in the email inbox.
Schrier said the approach to unlocking that value within those emails was a practical one in which McLeod brought in more than 100 people from across its customer base to determine the use cases they most needed to solve.
“It's all little incremental productivity enhancements of things that they do hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day,” he said.
A not-so-silver bullet
McLeod said while AI can do a lot, it can’t do everything.
Sujit Kunwor, a data scientist on McLeod’s product development team, said people have begun to better understand AI and its limitations. As the inflated expectations of AI’s capabilities deflate, he said, the real and impactful use cases are coming to light.
“Generative AI is not a silver bullet that solves everything,” Kunwor said. “You have to understand where you want to target the uses of AI before jumping into it. Defining that low-hanging fruit … before jumping into the implementation can be helpful.”
The key to success in the AI journey, he said, is starting small. He also suggested buying instead of building initially to test the waters without investing too much time and capital into a homemade solution that may not work. In addition, he said, be sure to have the right type of data, the right infrastructure to train or deploy AI, and the right talent in place.
“Just be mindful. Be practical. Take your time. Be careful, and this is going to be a real productivity gainer for you,” McLeod said.
