SPEAKER_01
0:37
All these details are in the product. They're in the UI. You could see all that stuff. The bidding happens in the product. The negotiation happens in the product. So we've taken all that bid data and we've used the bids to build a market rates tool. Brokers use it for pricing and for coverage. They negotiate with the carriers. They communicate with the carriers. They can message back and forth. And they can do this through now, you know, we're sending the bids back through API and we're sending the carrier back through an API. People all also can access our rate data through an API and through an Excel add-in.
SPEAKER_00
1:09
Finding a truck for a Mexico lane is not the same as proving the carrier, the rate, and every handoff will hold up in the real world. As part of the Cargo Rex Mexico cross-border trade guide, I'm joined by Matt Silver, co-founder and CEO of Cargado. Matt has built Mexico operations inside a major brokerage, founded and sold a cross-border brokerage, and now sees the market through the live broker postings and carrier bids. We're going to be breaking down how buyers can validate Mexican carrier capacity, interpret rate data, and assign ownership when a cross-border move starts to break. Matt, welcome in.
SPEAKER_01
1:43
Thank you.
SPEAKER_00
1:45
Absolutely. And now we were just discussing before we hit record on the companies who want to start, the brokerages and the shippers who are hearing about all of this movement that's going on within the you know, near shoring and bringing manufacturing back to North America, you know, they're starting to think about, or maybe some of these companies are starting to think about how they can expand their operations outside of the continental United States. And so for if you're in the head of a broker or a shipper, what should they know before they ever reach out to a Mexican carrier?
SPEAKER_01
2:19
So there is, let's kind of zoom out about how Mexico freight moves across the border. And there's about 12 border cities that most freight moves across, whether it's Laredo, uh Eagle Pass, Del Rio, Farr, Brownsville, El Paso, Otai Mesa, Calexico, and Nogales, and a few other smaller ones. And the freight that's moving through those border cities is going to locations in Mexico, whether it's right at the border or whether it's deep into Mexico. And then that freight, obviously, when it's in the United States, you're going to Canada, goes everywhere throughout the U.S. and Canada. And so when you're moving freight, a lot of it that's a lot of the freight that moves between the U.S. and Mexico is heavily centered around the eastern half of the U.S. So call it like Texas into the Midwest, to the northeast and the southeast, just given where there's a lot of manufacturing, a lot of automotive, um, aerospace, industrial, CPG, a lot of it feeds up there. Obviously, there's freight that goes to the West Coast, but um a lot of volume goes to the east coast. And there's a lot that centers around kind of the northern part of Mexico between Monterey, Guadalajara, which is southwest, and then Mexico City, which is in central, south central Mexico. And so you have freight moving through this, like, call it this NAFTA corridor, if you will, that goes from like central Mexico all the way up to to Lake Detroit and Toronto, and everything in between there. And you're using trucking companies typically to move that freight if you want it to move door to door that are based in the US, that's in their trailers into Mexico. And so a lot of the time you're using a US trucking company that you'd onboard, whether it's in a highway or an RMIS or my carrier portal, you're going to use those same carriers. They have a DOT number, they have an MC number. Um, a lot of those carriers will have B1 drivers, not CDL drivers. Uh, those are Mexican drivers that are that are able to travel and drive, you know, move freight in and out of the United States with a business visa, um, but they cannot do just domestic US on their own. So, like they couldn't go deliver a load in Seattle and then take a load from Seattle back down to Dallas and then another load from Dallas back down to Laredo or New Mexico. They could deadhead from Seattle all the way to Boise, Idaho or to Salt Lake City. They could pick up a load there to go back down to the border, but they cannot do a load within the United States. So you're when you're trying to move cross-border freight, you want to find the carriers that will send their trailers into Mexico. Sometimes their drivers cross the border, sometimes they don't, but the and the trucks do as well. The drive, the driver that's hauling in the United States, though, is not hauling deep in Mexico. It gets handed off at the border on one side of the, you know, either Laredo or Nueva Laredo. And then they use a partner trucking company in Mexico that takes the trailer into Mexico to get it unloaded or loaded. Um, and they take freight in both directions. And so you're gonna pay somebody like an M and J carriers in Laredo, Texas, a door-to-door rate to go from Monterey to Chattanooga to haul automotive freight. And MJ is gonna either use they're gonna use a Mexican partner company, whether they own that or they work with somebody else, they're gonna use a different driver that picks up that load of Monterey and brings it up to the border, goes on the trailer and goes across the border. And so, um, and then a driver takes it to the final destination in Tennessee that that's allowed to haul in the US. So when you say uh when logistics companies are sourcing trucking companies that are moving Mexico freight, more often than not, as a broker that's gonna be moving your first Mexico load, you're gonna use a U.S. trucking company that services Mexico. But it's gonna be somebody that sends their trailers into Mexico that understands the operations, they work with the customs brokers, they have a team at the border, they're usually based there, and they're they're they know what they're doing. They're usually gonna help you if you're doing it for your first time.
SPEAKER_00
6:18
What are the differences maybe from an operational standpoint out outside of you know, border CPB, you know, that those kinds of, you know, I guess classifications are inspections. What kind of operations maybe are are different in Mexico versus the United States?
SPEAKER_01
6:33
That whole workflow that I just explained about how freight moves door to door, but it so it stays on the same trailer, but the driver and the truck changes, that's the biggest difference. Because the when you're moving a load from Dallas to Atlanta, you're using one trucking company to go pick up that load with one driver, plus it's a team, um, to pick it up and deliver it. And and they just get a bill of lading at the shipper, and then when they deliver it, they get signed, and it's the it's the proof of delivery. And so for cross-border, you're you're still contracting one trucking company typically, and that's who you're gonna sign in your TMS, and you're gonna send them a Raycon that says moderated Chattanooga, and it might say where it's crossing and who the customs broker is, but it's still one carrier that you're gonna pay. They're using a different second carrier in Mexico, and then you need to know who that is because you communicate that to the company in Mexico that where it's picking up. You'll have to collect other details that you have to communicate to the customs broker, but other than that, and like you can't use the same type of GPS tracking in Mexico. Like, you can't just ask them for a cell phone number and plug it in to do GPS tracking because usually they won't give you their phone numbers. And even if you did get a phone number, it's you can't just like plug that in a macro point.
SPEAKER_00
7:47
Really? Why why aren't they giving out phone numbers? They just don't want you to have access to those drivers.
SPEAKER_01
7:52
The answer I've always heard is security reasons, because anytime somebody else can contact the driver, there's a risk of them being told to go somewhere else. And there's this security protocol called CTPAT, so customs trade partnership against terrorism. And uh that is effectively a protocol that trucking companies have to implement if they want to be able to haul most cross-border freight that's coming out of Mexico, because shippers operate under that process, and they basically say everything that we are doing is is is laden with security. So, like uh we have a guard at the entrance that you can't get through without getting fingerprinted, or not fingerprinted, but like you have to use like a fingerprint scanner if you're an employee typically. Um, or as a visitor, you have to give your ID, they check it, like they check you in. Um, you have to have a badge, you have to be with somebody at all times, like there's all sorts of rules. The main purpose is to keep drugs and people and weapons from getting into those trailers, into that freight, and hitting the border and and coming into the US. And so CTPAT is to protect the US from stuff coming in that shouldn't come in. And so most trucking companies operate with that because most shippers have to if they want to be able to ship stuff to the US more efficiently. Otherwise, every single load's gonna have more inspections at the border, it's gonna potentially have more delays and run more risk of theft, honestly, because the the security that you have to put on those trailers so that you can't open the trailer doors easily, GPS tracking, like a kill switch sometimes with the trucks. There's all sorts of stuff that they've got in place so that they can keep the equipment and the drivers and the freight safe.
SPEAKER_00
9:32
And so it it's not just as simple as, oh, I you know, I'm gonna start up an intermodal intermodal division inside of our brokerage. It's typically brokerages are are you know uh hiring out at first and partnering with uh you know a company that has had experience with moving Mexico across border freight. They're starting off in that area first before they maybe even build something internally, if I'm reading between the lines.
SPEAKER_01
9:57
No, not not necessarily. What I'm so the a broker that's brand new to Mexico, like they're I always tell people now, like as soon as you get that first, first of all, I think most freight brokers have customers that have Mexico freight. Whether they know that or not is a different story. If they've gone and asked them about it, like great, they know. Or if the shipper came to them and was like, I'm having this problem with my freight coming out of Mexico, can you help me? Then they they hear about it. But a lot of the time, they don't get that feedback, like they don't hear about that because I I can't tell you how many times I got on cause with shippers at in the past when I was at Arriver at Coyote, where uh someone was like, Oh my god, I had no idea you guys did Mexico. And I'm like, Oh yeah, I've been to Laredo 30 times at that point, or whatever amount of times. And and and like I remember after after Forger got acquired by Arrive, we there was a large shipper that somebody had been pursuing that we were able to get in with finally because of the fact that we had now a Mexico service offering to be able to provide them. And it was able to help grow that business overall. And so for most freight brokers, they have shippers that have Mexico freight. They just have to ask about it or they have to like figure out if they're in the right industry, like an automotive or a CPG, food embed, um appliances, electronics, aerospace, industrial. Like, think about all that earth-moving equipment and machinery and all the components that go into it. All that stuff is getting made in Mexico. So there's a lot that gets made in Mexico. Plus, there's produce, anything you could possibly find at a grocery store, like go look at half the labels at the grocery store from Mexico. And so, step one, like figure out if you have the freight first. And then step two is is get the opportunity and use cargado to price it and to cover it. And what I always tell people, and and I I in these sessions that I do with with brokerages, like, you don't need to go hire a Mexico person right away, you don't need a consultant, you don't need to like do code brokering agreement, like, do not do that. Um, two things. One is use our product to do the pricing and the sourcing, and when you match with the carriers, typically those trucking companies are going to help you move that freight because these trucking companies don't have salespeople, they have dispatchers that want to get their trucks moved and they want to get their trucks home. They have a handful of big shippers that load their trucks, but like for the smaller guys, they rely heavily on Cargata to find freight now for Mexico and or Canada. And so they they can come to our product to find that freight. And so they they will continue to come back, they will help the freight broker that they're working with. So the first time you get that load from your customer, you go, hey, who's your customer's broker? Can you put me in touch with them? And can you put me in touch with the facility in Mexico so I can talk to them and coordinate with them? You don't just want an email address or a phone number. You want an introduction from your customer so that they know the people in in Laredo or in Mexico so that they know that you are supposed to be doing this. Otherwise, they'll they'll be a little bit hard to work with. And so you ask the customer for the introduction to those people, you go get your capacity, you cover the load, the carrier knows that they have to give you certain details for every single load. So they're gonna do that. If you build a good relationship with them and you get on the phone with them, they're gonna help you, especially if you go, this is my first load from this customer that's Mexico. We move a lot for them in the US. Um, we're just getting into Mexico, you know, we're excited to match with you through Cargado or whatever. Um, and they're gonna help. And then they're gonna be like, come down to Laredo and let's drink some tequila. Uh, and so and you should go do that and and learn how Mexico freight works by going to Laredo and figuring that out. And none of this at this point has been go hire somebody. It's just go see how much freight you have and start moving that freight. Then if you have somebody that speaks Spanish at your company, that's the first person you start with. It's like if they speak Spanish and they can talk to somebody at at the border in Mexico, then you ask them to step in and help out and coordinate as needed. When it gets to the point where you're doing a couple loads a day, a few loads a day, start to grow, then you go, okay, all right, so we need somebody focused on this. And if that person at your company is uh, you know, if their family's from Mexico potentially, then even more exciting because they will have a cultural tie to what you're working on and they'll actually want to stay and be involved in that. And like I will when I started the Mexico business at Coyote, it was with one other person that was focused on Mexico, and and like everyone that we went and recruited were people that were just like in different operations roles that happen to have some sort of Mexican background or tie to Mexico, and folks banished. And so it was just like, here we go. Let's just bring this in and and like let's keep going and keep supporting this. And all of a sudden we had five people on our team. Like, you just need enough business to like get it going. You don't need to like spin up, like do a whole plan, like just like get it, just go ask your customers and get the freight, and and you will grow your business.
SPEAKER_00
15:02
So it's baby steps, it's building on relationships that you already have, and then uh I uh you hinted on it, but the communications aspect, because in a couple of your interviews that I was listening to, you you I think you mentioned that you guys had had a Nextel phone, which I used just used to call the B beep. Um, so the the the B beep phones inside of the offices so that you would use those to uh communicate with with anybody in Mexico is is I'm assuming that's evolved since then into WhatsApp, correct?
SPEAKER_01
15:30
Uh you can actually use Cargado to chat also. But yeah, WhatsApp is uh how people the two most common ways I see people trying to get their freight covered until they start using Cargado is LinkedIn and WhatsApp. There's like WhatsApp groups, there's also WhatsApp groups in Canada too. I'm in like two different groups in Canada that are like trucking companies and brokers and WhatsApp, like brokering freight and like trying to find trucks, and like it's like for intra-Canada, it's for across border Mexico. Like there's there's WhatsApp groups for all this stuff, but obviously more and more that's starting to happen in Cargado, which is really cool. And with um both the recommended carriers, so every time somebody posts freight, they get a list of the carriers that actually fit their needs um based on their profiles and their preferences and how they operate. But then on top of it, they you can message those carriers so you can send them messages in the product, you can see who the users are, and you can add people to it. And so it's it's more of a system of record than WhatsApp, or like it's just on somebody's personal phone. This is in the system and can be monitored. It translates between English, Spanish, and French, and we could add any other language that we need to.
SPEAKER_00
16:35
Um, and so it it's we've built this to replace WhatsApp, and that's where I my brain kind of went with WhatsApp because I was like, God, the hunting down a record has to be a nightmare. And the fact that folks are moving freight with LinkedIn boggles my mind. I I is that just starting up or is that kind of trending down now?
SPEAKER_01
16:57
Um, when I first raised money for Cargado in like October of 2023, there were screenshots of WhatsApp and LinkedIn. So uh I don't think I like I don't remember that being as prevalent like when I was building Forager, but like it was, you know, that was like here's what's going on, and like it still happens because they're just like there's like 25,000 freight brokers out there or something like that. And and like, you know, I'm trying to figure out how to like get in front of all them. And like, you know, I just did the pod the one episode about you know, with for agent stuff, and like it got a message on LinkedIn the next day from somebody that's an agent at a brokerage, and and like that he'd heard this on the way to a a soccer his kids' soccer practice or something. So um there's so many uh brokerages out there that like right now they're used to like the easy button for the US that just like go post a load and pray and hope that you get a call or a bunch of calls, and then you get those calls and hopefully they're real brokers or real carriers rather, not not brokers or somebody stealing freight. We've tried to skip that whole thing and and move towards integrated experience. We're integrating with all these TMSs right now to pull freight in um and to push capacity back into TMSs. So um we're actually, as of last week, we've started to automatically cover freight for at least one broker who uses in the cloud, uh, and also have integrations that are pretty deeply done or further along with uh Turvo, Ty, and um uh fairly far along with Revanova, and then another big one next after that that we have to start working on shortly, uh, and then going deeper after that. But the goal is to automate all this stuff. And so as we pull in more freight from TMSs and trucking companies can come in and they can see that freight, they see that it's real, they can book it and they'll get excited about it and they'll they'll interact there more and they'll spend more time there.
SPEAKER_00
19:44
And so from the the platform perspective with Cargato, you know, from my understanding, it was an invite-only load board to begin with. And it's had, you know, some some definite, I mean, as all technology does, but it's had some different innovations and integrations to your point, uh, you know, what you're saying now. And so you're saying that a lot of the the transactions they're happening within the platform, they're happening, communications are happening through the chat, and then now integrations into other existing software stacks. Uh I'm I'm curious what I what does it look like if I'm you know working on uh cross-border trade? Is it you know cargado, one of my tabs that I have open? How does it fit into my existing processes?
SPEAKER_01
20:25
Load boards, the easiest thing to say for anybody in this industry because it's the most common term, but only about 60% of the stuff that gets posted in our marketplace is a load. The other 40% of the postings are lanes. So that means that they are something that's consistently moving three loads a day, five loads a week. It is uh one of our customers said it's like the only billboard that you get to put up somewhere where you can say, I have this contracted freight. Who wants it? Um, and so carriers can see when they go in and they bid on this freight, they see loads and lanes or projects that are, you know, it could be for six weeks during the summer if it's produce related, or it could be year-round, it could be drop and hook, it could be round trip, it could be power-on, step decks, RGNs. It's this was built with like I brokered freight for 17 years and I did all the really weird stuff, not just like normal drive and domestic freight. And so we thought about everything every like open deck, it tarps, straps, chains, like dimensions and all that stuff automatically show up as over-dimensional if you put something in over-dimensional, but like people actually do a great job covering over-dimensional freight. And so this has been built specifically for that experience of both like covering spot freight and contracted freight. And so it is not just like Craigslist for Mexico freight, it is much more uh uh like I feel more like an Airbnb than a Craigslist, I guess. If you were to think about like the the detail that goes into the posting, there's no pictures that people are posting at, but like um there's a lot of detail. And so uh we pull that in whether somebody puts it in manually or uh or through integrations and and through mappings that we have set up. But um the idea is that that freight gets posted, gets notified out to these carriers. They can go look and they can go, oh, I'm not tanker endorsed, or I don't have I'm not bonded, or I don't have any bonding capacity, or bond or hazmat drivers over there, or I don't do, I'm not this, or I don't do this thing, or I don't want to haul that type of freight. They can see all of that. They don't have to deal with a phone call from a freight broker that's like harassing them to take a load, or they don't have to a broker doesn't have to deal with a carrier calling and going, hey, I can haul that load, and you get 15 minutes in the call to explain what's going on, and then you you mention the fumigation, and they're like, Oh, we don't do fumigation, and and the whole thing is off. And you've just wasted 15 minutes talking to this carrier about this load that they can't do. All these details are in the product, they're in the UI. You could see all that stuff. The bidding happens in the product, the negotiation happens in the product. So we've taken all that bid data and we've used the bids to build a market rates tool. So brokers use it for pricing and for coverage, they negotiate with the carriers, they communicate with the carriers, they can message back and forth, um, and they can do this through um now, you know, we're sending the bids back through API and we're sending the carrier back through an API. Um, people all also can access our rate data through an API and through an Excel add in. And I guess you could use the API with cloud.
SPEAKER_00
23:32
Are there any interesting use cases that you that you've seen coming out of using this data with with some of these LLMs?
SPEAKER_01
23:37
There's a few things. One is I I know of a few different customers who have um they've vibe coded their own sidecars in their inbox. So, like the, you know, I got an email from a shipper that says I need a quote, and it goes and gets the rate from their US rate source. Um, they needed, you know, us from Mexico. And so um there's at least uh a few different brokers I know that have done that themselves. Uh, we've also been asked to do these integrations with like um with some of the third-party tools that people are using, and we're doing that stuff right now too, so that they can pull it in if they use like um like a Vuma, for example, and and their email will will integrate with somebody like that. And so, but people are doing it themselves, which is cool to see because like we get these messages uh in our support chat or whatever that's just like, hey, how do I get an API key? And I'm like, what do you need an API key for? What TMS do you guys use? And they're like, Well, we're on Turvo for a TMS, but also like we built this thing in our email and we'd like to just pull rates in. And I'm like, oh my god, yes, let's talk right away. And so um, that's exciting to see people doing that stuff. However, um, we also built an MCP that's attached to everything, and so like we could do more stuff internally, and then just given the access to the data that I have within what we have right now, and eventually we'll make this a little bit more available to people. Um, I can take someone's last year's worth of data and give them an analysis as to like me, Claude. Um, Claude will go run this analysis on uh their last 12 months of data. So, like I did this with a large 3PL business, actually, and we looked at their last 12 months or six months or something like that worth of data. Um, and it was every load that they moved for the last time frame, um, how much they spent, what the date was that I picked up, the the origin destination, the equipment type. And because of um the data that I can access, I could go back and go, hey, you know, on January 15th, you would have spent this. Like right now, we show people the last 12 weeks of the rates in the in our UI and in the Excel add-in and in the API, but um soon enough we'll have it so that in the API you can go six months ago. Right now I can do it. So, like we'll just run a benchmarking exercise for somebody and go, hey, had you been running, you know, all your freight through Cargato for the last six months, you would have saved four million dollars or 12 million or whatever the price is that they would have saved, um, rather than land relying on like a couple large carriers.
SPEAKER_00
26:07
It's it's such an exciting time, but also just, oh my gosh, it's it how do you deal with the ability to do so much more work, but still maintain maybe some semblance of a work-life balance?
SPEAKER_01
26:23
Oh, slash RC, which in Cloud Code turns on remote control and you could do it from your phone. Uh um, it is like I've buddy of mine, Eden, that like running joke about the fact that we have like cloud code and chat GPT running with like remote sessions on everything, and you know, like you can have like six, eight different tabs open at one time for cloud code, and then on top of it, like so. We use Notion as our knowledge base as a business and our our uh like where all of our context as a business now lives, all of our meetings are transcribed and live there, and um, like our sales calls are also done with Fathom, but that stuff goes into Notion. And so at any time I can go, I can go in a Notion agent or Notion AI and go, you know, tell me everything that we've ever done with uh this customer, you know, XYZ logistics, and it will do everything from pulling together their usage to the users that are in the product but haven't been invited yet, or the people that haven't opened uh marketing invites or marketing emails, rather, and people that have been on calls and who was on the sales call and like whether or not they like what they bought into and what they were excited about and what their biggest complaints were, and then you get this nice like executive summary with anything you want to click into. And so that's like you could, you know, you do that with no like you spin up a bunch of tabs in Notion and a bunch of tabs in cloud code, and you're just like, you know, anybody with ADD that is like running a business, it's just like the greatest thing ever because it's just like exponentially impactful if you can control it and if you connect the right stuff, it could also become expensive if you like like don't manage your tokens and and like models the right way, but that's also like a whole you know model routing thing.
SPEAKER_00
28:12
Have you have you graduated to the foot pedal or the the whisper flow? And for folks who may not be aware, there's a there is a kind of an evolution going on that I'm seeing that instead of uh typing, people are now speaking more and having conversations with their LLMs. And instead of actually pulling up a you know a microphone, they have a foot pedal at their at their desk and they just use a foot pedal to speak into. Have you graduated to that level?
SPEAKER_01
28:37
Not the foot pedal. I don't think I'm gonna do the foot pedal. I do have lemon. Uh I have whisper flow also, but for some reason I started using lemon and I think it it works well. The I'll like I don't do it for everything, but if I don't know, it depends on the mood, and it depends on what I want to say. And like half the time, I have a six-month-old now, I have a five and a half-year-old son, but also six month-old. And so, like, if he's sitting in my lap, would it be funny if I was like he's here right now? Uh if he's sitting in my lap while I'm working, then yeah, I'm holding down the function or the control key or whatever, and like dictating. And half the time, my other son will be like, Who are you talking to? Are you on a meeting right now? I'm like, No, the computer. And is then it's like 10 o'clock at night, I have to be typing. But like, um, yeah, what does not work well yet is uh like like in Claude, you can use voice or slash voice, and it just like it just uh like takes the words out of your mouth and prints them as you say them. Whereas like Lemon and I think Whisperflow um both take everything that you say and like structure it, contextualize it and like clean it up. There's still a little bit of, you know, if you kind of fumble through stuff, it won't necessarily clean that up. I don't know if you know, you can do two things. You can both like dictate exactly what you want it to say, or you can tell it what you want it to do and formulate, and then it will put that together for you.
SPEAKER_00
30:02
That's I I've only ever used it with uh ChatGPT and Claude. More more so, I I've started shifting my work back to to Chat GPT out. Claude just kind of for a little bit there. I was using it a ton, and then it just got a little preachy, in my opinion. And so I start I moved, you know, my my stack over to ChatGPT for a little bit. And um, the the work that I'm I'm producing there is just so much more impactful um to you know, just everyday admin sort of things that I don't want to do, where I want to, you know, be able to have more conversations like this, like like what we're having now. And it I think it's just the the parallel of you and your work and what you're building and what you know it excites you. I mean, even in this conversation, you know, talking about some of the advancements that that are happening with these LLMs, um I am curious of how you see the platform of Cargato, you know, kind of evolving with the rest of the industry, or is the rest of the industry still kind of you know, a little bit behind in that regard?
SPEAKER_01
31:03
There's definitely people are definitely adopting AI, like across the industry. There's a there's like a spectrum of it. There are a bunch of companies that are like stuck in like I don't know whether they've chosen this or gotten stuck on it that somehow, but they're all stuck using Copilot or whatever with Microsoft, which like is pretty limiting. I know it taps into, I don't know whether like they could tap into Claude or ChatGPT or both models or whatever, but I know that it is like more restrictive than if you were to set up, you know, the way like I've Claude and ChatGPT both open right now and like separately from Cloud Code, which is connected to ChatGPT and Grok and Gemini and Kimmy and like uh GLM. So like it's like you depending on how you set your stuff up, like it just depends on how like deep you go in it. And so I think everybody is gonna adopt it. Like when I was in Laredo uh uh a couple few months ago, one of the carriers I went and visited, um, I asked them about like how they feel about AI. And currently people, this is still in beta, and it's gonna be in beta for a while, but people can make calls through our product too. Um, but it goes through the product similar to like when an Uber driver is picking you up, you don't call your phone. Um, and so what we what I I'm curious about with trucking companies is like how they feel about getting these calls from voice agents that that um are not clearly not human. And uh one of the cares I asked about it, they said that they actually like it if if it works well. And then they rattled off a list of brokers and they're like, that one's works well, that one doesn't, that one's works well, I can book loads with that guy. And so now they're like figuring out which ones they can like what they can do. And separately, like I saw uh someone else pull up a broker's like their own private load board, and they know exactly how to game their margin on every load. And I was just like, holy shit, like uh watching, like they know how to do this stuff, and it's just like this is like these are the things that like this is why brokers should like focus on integrating stuff rather than just like trying to do it themselves. But uh what they like about working with the voice agents is that they know that they can book loads right away. Carers don't want to waste time not getting loads, they get really frustrated when they waste time bidding on freight that they don't get that converts, whether it's through our product or whether it's on a phone call after they called somebody off DAT or truck stop or wherever, like they get frustrated if they don't get a load, especially if they send a truck or whatever. Um, and so when they can pick up when they get a call from an agent and that agent is connected to the TMS and or in a system that can allow them to send a Raycon, then like they like that. What they hate is when they have to talk to a human after the agent. Apparently, they're like, Why do I have to if I have to verify this with a human, why didn't I talk to the human in the first place? And they are being treated not well in that case because the broker, the broker's like, okay, I can use an agent to weed out any of the bad carrier calls, but then the good ones, I'm gonna still make them talk to a human. And so it's like creating more work and like it's not a good like setup at all for everybody. And I don't think that's the future of where this industry is going. And so I I do think like I think some of the companies like the happy robots and fleetworks and boomas will be successful. I don't know what those companies and augment, but like I don't know what those companies look like long term. I do know that they will go beyond logistics if they want to get really, really, really valuable base and like venture scale. Um, but this trucking company, the other thing that they told me, besides the fact that they like booking freight through uh these voice agents is that some guys sitting over there uh used Chat GPT to build their own voice agent system and their own email response agent like that could handle customer support. And so anytime a customer would call in asking for help, a voice agent could answer that now. And anytime somebody emailed, a voice agent was responding. And I was like, what system are you guys using? They're like, that guy. And I'm like, what system is he using? They're like, let me uh we'll bring you over to him. And I talked to him for a few minutes, and I'm like, what are you using? He's like chat GPT and like some some Claude. And I'm like, I was expecting him to tell me one of the like one of these companies, and he just built it. And like, this is like a uh, I don't know, they're like 200 trucks, 150 trucks in Laredo and Service Mexico, and really, really high quality carrier, but like they're not. I would that was the last thing I expected to walk into um like in that meeting.
SPEAKER_00
35:25
It's like a lot of uh I would I would say just to to uh piggyback off of that, it sounds like there there aren't earlier in the conversation. We were talking about, you know, that maybe some of the the the tech challenges, or maybe not challenges, but just differences between you know uh communicating in the United States versus you know WhatsApp and that that domination and even you know Cargado's chat. So it doesn't sound like there's any of that uh difference between the communications or the tools being used between you know US and Mexico-based companies, uh, if I'm reading between the lines, or is it mostly US companies that are starting to have just a guy at a desk and you know building some of these tools that they that they need internally?
SPEAKER_01
36:05
People are building this stuff in Mexico too. I just think it's um Mexico Freight works differently. There's not like even people's TMSs are not fully built to support Mexico Freight the right way or with all the right details. And like that's what we're stitching on top of it, that we can house that information. And you know, when you need it, you access it. When you don't, it's sitting here. Right now we're working on automating coverage for people, and we've been doing this for like three, almost not even three years yet. And so um we are sprinting towards this very big vision on on helping automate the entire experience of of moving Mexico and Canada freight. And so um we are now as of last week at the point where we can automate coverage for people, and and you know, then you get into what happens after you cover a load, you need to keep track of it, you need to know where it is in Mexico, and you need to be able to communicate where the load's going. And I just don't think stacking a bunch of agents on top of that is a way to solve that. I think there's integrations and there are agents, and that will be like both parts of that will be part of our product or already part of it, and so um that's where it's going in the future, I would say.
SPEAKER_00
37:12
So a last couple questions here, you know, for for folks who have maybe have listened to this conversation and they're not sure what step to take next. Is there anything that you feel is important that we haven't already talked about that they should know?
SPEAKER_01
37:25
Everyone always thinks that freight gets stolen in Mexico. I can count on less than one hand the amount of times that I've had a load stolen in my career in Mexico while I was brokering freight. Wow. Um I see way more on social media about uh it getting stolen because they posted a load somewhere. Um and so uh in the US, not Mexico. Um, I but I can think of all the times that it happened, and it was usually because of bad betting. It was not based on like somebody being tricked. There's no cargo insurance in Mexico. Uh, you could buy it uh if you need it, but most shippers will insure it on their end and will not require you to insure it. And so you should not assume you have to insure it, um, and the carriers won't insure it either. Um, so you would just buy uh coverage from a couple different providers. And then our product does work for domestic Mexico too. But if you're not a broker with an entity in Mexico, you should not be touching that without setting up the entity to be able to pay Mexican company and pesos, bill a company and you know, shipper and pesos, like don't do it in USD.
SPEAKER_00
38:33
Well, this Matt, this was a conversation that before we started hitting record, I told you that I thought that I could have about two hours worth of conversations with you. And this is uh this is already the longest Cargo Rex interview we've ever done. Um, we're we try to stick around, you know, sort of 30 minutes, but I feel like I'm struggling now to to just sort of bring it to a close. Um anything else that that folks who are interested in trying out, uh Cargato in in and learning more, maybe participating in in one of your future webinars, where can they go and they can ask more questions um that that you know they should know?
SPEAKER_01
39:07
I mean, our website's cargado.com. I'm all over LinkedIn, X, social media. Um, just find me on the internet. I'm on there. Uh pretty accessible. And and I I write a blog, and then we also are putting more content on our website for people. There's actually a lot of the Mexico 101 content that I I have used and created and um regurgitated at people a hundred times now is content on our website now that people can read and or point an agent at and go consume.
SPEAKER_00
39:42
Yeah, so point your agent at decargado.com, and then you can find out all of find out if you're ready to even get started and how to get started. And then when you're ready to actually, you know, go the extra mile, for lack of a better phrase, then that's when they reach out for a demo.
SPEAKER_01
39:57
Yeah, I mean I vibe-coded a test for that, but it's not public yet.
SPEAKER_00
40:01
Um yet is the keyword.
SPEAKER_01
40:04
Yeah, and then I my blog is also mattsilver.ai. Uh it used to be a much longer name, but um, but yeah, that's I I read a lot about just building a Mexico business and building brokerage and startup life too.
SPEAKER_00
40:18
Yeah, it's a it's a great uh couple websites. I'll make sure that I I put them in the show notes just to make it easy for folks. But Matt, this was this was uh the expectations I think were high for a really great conversation, but that you know you've exceeded them. So I appreciate you and and your insight and and taking the time to share that with us all today.
SPEAKER_01
40:36
Thank you.
SPEAKER_00
40:38
Thank you so much for tuning into this special edition from Cargo Rex. This is one of many series that we have planned. So if you have a chance to check out more of our content, please do hit the subscribe button. It helps a lot with growing the channel. And then also, if you want to support more content like this, head on over to CargoRex.io and consider becoming a premium or plus member. Offers a lot of benefits, all listed over on the website. Just hit the pricing tab over on the website and you can get signed up and even possibly be featured in one of these interviews just like this. Thank you so much.
