Episode 299 - Interview with Mike Mullen, COO of Bear Cognition - (9/30/24) On today's show: 1. Bear Cognition's website - https://www.bearcognition.com/ This episode's music is by Tyler Boone (tylerboonemusic.com). The episode was produced by LMC Soundsystem.
Holy City Sinner Radio
Episode 299 - Interview with Mike Mullen, COO of Bear Cognition - (9/30/24)
(upbeat music) Holy City Center Radio is episode 299, and I am your host Christian Sanger, too. J is Friday, October 4th. One, two, three, four. (upbeat music) Hello, everyone. Happy to be back with you on Holy City Center Radio. It's the Friday edition. Yes, one episode shy of the big 300. Can't believe I have done that many episodes. Anybody who has listened to any chunk of those, I greatly appreciate it. I hope it hasn't been too terrible. Thank you so much for listening. Hope you had a great week, and hope you have an amazing weekend ahead. If you need any plans, go to holycitycenter.com/calendar, and you'll be able to see what is coming up, not just this weekend, but in the days, weeks, and months ahead, if I do say so myself and I do, it is the best events calendar in Charleston. So if you're looking for something to do, chances are you're gonna find it there. But regardless, if you decide to just lay low all weekend or find some of those plans, I hope you have an amazing weekend. Today shows a nice, easy going one. No sad or ridiculous news stories. We just got a fun interview for you. We're gonna talk about AI, which is, of course, something that is on the tip of everyone's tongue, it seems. There's always some new products coming out who are discussions about where AI could be going, and other conversations about easing people's fears about where it is not going. And I'm sure you've heard all about that, but have you heard from someone who works with a company that has AI being a big part of what they offer and what they do, especially one here in the Charles scenario? Well, today is that day. My guest is Mike Mullen. He is the COO of Bear Cognition, which is a performance analytics company for mission critical organizations that want to use the power of data to gain an unfair advantage. That is how the company describes himself. We'll get into it here in just a moment so you can learn more about it. And so, yes, as usual with an interview show, we won't be discussing any of the latest news stories, but rest assured, I've got plenty to talk about on that next episode where it is not an interview. You're not missing out on anything. I'll be sure to cover all those things, you know, in the next episode. I don't think I have another interview scheduled for a while. So next week, we'll get back into it. So without any further delay, sit back and enjoy the interview. And joining me now is Mike Mullen. As promised, he is the COO of Bear Cognition. We're going to learn all about that company. Mike, thank you so much for joining me today. I greatly appreciate it. Great, awesome to be here, Christian. Much appreciated for having us on. Of course, yeah, I'm really excited to learn more about this company and it's a topic that you see covered in everywhere, every news outlet talking about AI. And we're going to talk about specifically how your business uses that and implements it. But before we get into that, I always like our listeners to learn a little bit about the person who's speaking outside of just their title. So if you could, just feel free to tell us a little bit about yourself, your background. If you lived here, if you moved here, just anything you think will help people just know who you are a little better. Sure. So I came to Charleston back in 1998, came here for, I already go to college at Charleston, ended up getting a business degree from COC. At the time, in high school, wasn't really quite sure where I wanted to go. I grew up surfing down in Florida. And I asked my college advisor where somewhere was that I could get into school that was still close to the ocean. And he suggested college at Charleston, didn't even come and visit it and ended up coming here loving it and have been here ever since. So, yeah, it's a great city. When I graduated college, I ended up moving up to your neck of the woods and moved to New York. I actually followed my now wife up there and ended up living up there for about a year. Started working for a third party logistics company up there called World Wide Express. And that's really where even the bear cognition journey started was during that time, really. So work of World Wide Express for the year when I was up there ended up getting an opportunity to open an office down in Charleston and then moved to Charleston. And it's kind of in history ever since. So, yeah, I mean, that's the background. - It's great that you got to come back here to Charleston, obviously a place you like. And that's really great that you had the opportunity to come on back. And you mentioned bear cognition, obviously. That's what I've said at the top as well. So tell us a little bit about this company. What is it, how did it come to be? And in the grand scheme of things, what does the company do? - Sure, so I mentioned that had worked with, worked for a third party logistics company. And as a long time ago, right? I mean, started with the organization about 20 years ago. And during that time, there weren't, I mean, there were third party logistics companies out there, but there weren't a ton of them. At least not like there are today. And we had a very, we had a great business model, right? We could walk into any business that was really shipping and be able to consolidate all of their different carriers into one invoice and generally be able to, to save them some money, right? So these companies would usually be dealing with four or five different vendors at a time. We could really make their lives a lot easier by bringing that all into one place, putting it on one invoice and then like I said, saving them a couple of bucks. And it was great. It was real easy for us to, to bring on business, but as, you know, as that continued on, a lot more competition came into the marketplace. And it really turned less so of a service-oriented business and then more into a commodity-driven business where it was just all about just saving money and that was it. So about five years ago, I guess six years ago now, we were looking for different ways to differentiate ourselves from the competition. And we looked at, you know, one thing that our customers were really looking for was better data visualizations on their reports, a better reporting that we were providing. And World Wide Express was actually a franchise-based business model. So we went back to our franchise or asked them for this and they said there's no way that they could provide it, but they would give us access to the data. And at the time, we really didn't know what that meant. You know, we knew that, okay, this is great. We've got this data. What do we do with it? So we went and, you know, talked to a couple different data analytics firms and consultants that then, you know, helped us put together a base-level set of visualizations that we then turned around and provided to our better customers and found that it worked out tremendously. You know, we were finding not only better retention with these customers, but there were, you know, ultimately wanting to spend more with us to bring all of this data into one spot and see these visualizations and, you know, be able to have their reporting on all of their transportation spend and all that. So that was great. And, you know, that went on for a little while. We, you know, gave it to all of our key accounts and to, you know, these, most of our larger customers and all that good stuff. And they started asking for additional analytics. And that's when we were like, hey, this could probably be its own business and started really investing in the analytics side of things. So we exited the 3PL and the third-party logistics company and then started up Vericognition to strictly just focus on analytics and data science for companies. - And now that, you know, it's shifted to that. Obviously, it's been a while, but artificial intelligence is a big part of that and some of the services you offer, but not just that, but what sort of products and services do you offer to businesses right now? Like, what sort of, if I'm coming in, I own a company, I'm needing some help, what sort of things would you, you know, let them know about what you have? - At the end of the day, we're a high-touch data solutions company that offers data and systems integration, software development and customized optimization tools. And we house all of those in our intelligence supply chain platform. We have a bunch of capabilities internally and we approach this from a few different ways. One way that we go about this is, you know, we try to eliminate that no-joy work through automation and process optimization inside these organizations. So when you think about it, every company has no-joy work inside of it, right? You've got, you know, whether it's a secretary that's doing a ton of data entry or you just have employees that are sitting there taking emails and looking at PDFs and then throwing those into Excel spreadsheets would be an example of that, right? We have customers that we're spending, we're, you know, call it five or six employees, all that they were doing every day was sitting there, looking at their email and then plugging information into an Excel sheet. So we come in and we can essentially just automate a ton of that stuff. And we utilize AI, ML, a ton of different tools to do that and have, again, a lot of different capabilities inside the organization that can utilize that. So I think that's one big way that we can use AI and ML to help these organizations. Another way that we do it is through GAP applications. So every company's got a tech stack, right? They have different softwares that they're using to help run their business. For the most part, you know, those softwares are doing a good job for them. But when they find something that that software can't do, you know, from a reporting side or from a prediction or forecasting side, that's where we can come in and help, you know, build a tool outside of that product to then assist and be able to, you know, kind of fill the GAP that maybe that SaaS solution is not currently doing for them. So those are two, you know, primary examples is how we go to market and what we do for those customers. - Very cool. So obviously this is something that can help businesses everywhere and I'm sure you have clients, you know, across the nation, if not beyond. But you are here, you're based in the Charleston area. So obviously I'm sure there's some Charleston businesses that you all work with. How have they, when it comes to some of these like newer technologies especially, how is the, you know, whatever customers you're working with or maybe people that you've spoken to but didn't ultimately decide to use any of your services? What's the feedback or what's the experience been? Is Charleston accepting and evolving with this technology or are they kind of resistant, you know, the people that you talk to? - No, I think Charleston is a great place to have a tech company personally. You know, we have a lot of support here as well. You know, Charleston Digital Corridor, I think does a fantastic job with putting on events and helping with different learning activities that are out there. You know, there's data science meetups that are out there. There's different BI tool meetups that are out there. The community is way more techy than one might think. I think that the port gets a lot of the port Boeing, these large companies get, you know, a lot of credit I think for running that economy but I do think that tech is really stepping up and has a foothold here in the Charleston community. And there's a ton of great people that are in it too. So couldn't be happier for being in Charleston with that. - And kind of circling back, you had mentioned before, we were giving examples of, you know, what people may be doing within their specific roles and how you can help, you know, eliminate, you know, that kind of more boring work or whatever you wanna call it. And I think it was important that you were saying, well you were doing that to help free up those employees to do other things and not what I think a lot of people always get scared about with any technology, not just AI, but oh, this is just gonna replace people. But it sounds like more so, the goal is no, let's free up people who have a role, let's free up some of those more menial tasks, things that, you know, they don't need to be focusing on and they can go do something else. You know, so they're still very much employed but they're just doing, you know, different work, not having to be tied down with some of the more mundane things. - It's 100% right. I mean, you know, these, giving them opportunities to do things that they were either hired to do or that they want to do, you're gonna get such better work out of that employee in the long run. You know, there'll be better ideation, better at actually wanting to be there and not just, you know, slogging away at data entry or, you know, what we were calling that no joy work day after day. - And so having been in this field for a while and seeing how it's evolved, you know, obviously you don't have a crystal ball, but what do you think the future holds for the type of work that you all do? You know, AI and just like any other technology, you know, it constantly evolves and grows. Are you seeing any next big thing on the horizon or is it more of, you just think more and more people are going to embrace technology or both? What do you see in this industry and on the future? - I think from the AI side of things, you know, it's really, it's not enough on its own, you know. I mean, the products that are out there, like the chat GPTs of the world, I mean, they're amazing, right? I mean, you can go, they're asking pretty much anything and get a kick out of a solution that will at least get you started on something. But I think of the challenge that exists there is how do you actually put that into a workflow of a business? How do you get it incorporated into your processes in a way that makes it seamless? And there are, you know, there's, there are APIs in different ways that we actually can come in and do that for organizations to make it, you know, an easier process for them. So I think that that's really what we're going to see. You know, I think it's Microsoft that just came out the past couple of days where they're saying that they want you to start talking to your computer, right? Like, and that's AI that's doing that. So what are, how are they and how are we incorporating AI into people's lives outside of just, you know, going to a site and asking a question. It's going to be more ingrained in things than maybe people know. And I think that's only going to make us, you know, stronger overall as a company and as an organization. - With everything we've talked about, you know, I know that this industry can be confusing to some folks. I think you've done a good job of kind of explaining, you know, what's out there and, you know, what sort of work you all do. Is there anything I haven't asked that you think is important about this work or this industry, whether it's, you know, things that are being offered now or again, looking to the future, or just anything you think people need to know that I haven't asked about or we haven't really discussed? - I think that AI, it's, you know, it can come across as it being like very complex if you don't really know what you're looking at. And it's not a solution that's going to work for everything. It's not going to create solutions for all of our problems, right? When thinking about it, I think there's five, five different ways that we actually approach it and we'll consider using AI or ML. And that's with either automation, right? So the data entry and document processing stuff that I've already talked about. Prediction, you know, where you have, maybe you've got a sales team and you want to get an idea of what next quarter is going to look like using previous information that's out there or previous outcomes. Classification, so just categorizing data into predefined groups, you know, that's something that we see inside the transportation industry a ton. Optimization, so route optimization, pricing optimization, ways that you're making, your streamlining processes that are out there. And then the last thing is like pattern recognition. So identifying patterns that humans can't really identify on their own. And I think a great example of this is Spotify, right? Like, how does it, you know, I listen to Led Zeppelin, how does it know that I'm going to like Red Hot Chili Peppers, I think that's a good example. So, you know, using those is how we like to approach all the AI problems that are out there, you know, and try to simplify those for people that are doing business with us. And for anybody who's interested in learning more about your company, where can they find more information? - You can go to barrecognition.com. Again, as everyone knows, we are local here at Charleston. We do like to have face-to-face meetings. So, you know, we'd love to set up a time to come and chat. - Nice, well, thank you so much for joining me, Mike. I really appreciate it. Got to learn more about the company that I knew basically nothing about. So I really appreciate that. Hopefully, more people will now know what's out there and what's available and, you know, what things are coming down as far as technology and what the future holds. I really appreciate it. - All right, great. Thanks, Christian, appreciate the time. - And that'll do it for this edition of Holy City Center Radio. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks to Mike Mullen for coming on today and having that discussion. Again, if you need plans, holycitycenter.com/calendar is the place to go. Also, if you have a moment, please rate and review this podcast, a like, subscribe, whatever you can do on the platform you're listening on, please do so. It helps expand the podcast so other people can hear it. If you want to go to that extra step, you can go to patreon.com/holycitycenter and sign up for one of those support tiers. Thank you to Lindsay Marie Collins with LMC Soundsystem for producing this in every episode of Holy City Center Radio and a big thank you to Tyler Boone, who's music you hear in each and every show. And last but certainly not least, a big thank you to all of you for listening. I greatly appreciate it. Have an amazing weekend. I'll talk to you soon. Until then, good night. Good luck. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]