By Maneet Singh, CIO and Chief Digital Officer
When we began our project to create our centralized data lake, the goal was straightforward: unify Odyssey’s information streams and eliminate silos that were artificially dividing our business.
That goal is now a reality. Applying AI across our data lake, we can analyze, model, and act across the enterprise in ways that simply weren’t possible before. Already, we’re seeing tangible results: we can offer our customers faster, more data-driven decision-making, insights, and efficiencies.
However, the most surprising impact hasn’t been on these KPIs—it’s been on our thinking. Our data lake has surfaced new questions, inviting us to reconsider some of the most basic assumptions about Odyssey’s functioning.
This has been tremendously exciting: once you start questioning assumptions, you start seeing possibilities you couldn’t see before.
Going beyond AI as a tool
Right now, most conversations about AI focus on how it can help an existing business run more efficiently. For example, an exciting use case for AI in logistics is to think through how it might help with route planning. These are useful applications, but they represent incremental thinking.
One thing our data lake project taught me is that true innovation and visionary thinking don’t simply make existing processes more efficient or effective—they recast those processes, forcing their forms to evolve.
The real question then becomes: what happens when AI changes the very nature of the business itself?
In the next two to five years, AI won’t just help logistics providers execute today’s processes more efficiently—it will enable entirely new models that make some of today’s processes irrelevant.
This is the disruptive curve we’re staring down. If we limit ourselves to incremental improvements, someone else will ride that curve ahead of us.
Why vision can’t start with data
I’ve earned a reputation at Odyssey for being hyper-focused on data, and, of course, it’s critical for an organization to be data driven. Data gives you accurate information on processes that already exist at your organization—essentially, it’s fuel for continuous improvement.
For true disruption, however, data isn’t always your friend. It can’t help you push beyond current paradigms of how you structure or think about work. This requires creativity, foresight, and leadership.
To take an organization into a future that’s still taking shape, you need to engage people’s curiosity, imagination, and courage, without the immediate constraint of existing metrics.
As AI’s potential both at Odyssey and in the world at large continues to emerge, I strongly believe that the biggest barrier to harnessing it won’t be the technology itself, it will be the limits of our own thinking.
Why the logistics tech lag might be a good thing
At this point, many of my logistics colleagues may have questions. How are we going to disrupt our industry if we’ve been so slow to adopt new technology in the past? I myself have written at length about logistics’ tech debt, though my views on it are evolving.
It may turn out, for instance, that this lag could turn out to be an asset. In many sectors, digital transformation has been a slow climb—companies have decades of sunk costs in legacy systems they must navigate around. In logistics, the gap is often so wide that we can leapfrog entire generations of technology, moving directly to AI-driven, data-mature operations without the detour.
Our connected-data foundation is a perfect example: by unifying our operational data first, we’ve set ourselves up to integrate AI in ways that are both more ambitious and more grounded than companies still wrestling with fragmented systems.
Small, fearless teams leading the way
Not every part of an organization can—or should—work at the bleeding edge. For most of our business, the mission is to deliver excellence today. But we’ve also created small, dedicated teams tasked with testing big, sometimes uncomfortable ideas. These groups have the mandate to “fail fast,” run small-scale prototypes, and partner with customers who are eager to experiment alongside us.
This approach reduces risk while ensuring we’re always probing the edges of what’s possible. The data lake plays a role here too—it helps us identify where assumptions are most vulnerable and where disruption could yield the greatest value.
At the frontiers of change
In logistics, I predict the next five years will bring changes as fundamental as any in the industry’s history. At Odyssey, we intend to be at the frontiers of these changes—not just using AI to make today’s business better, but re-imagining what the business itself can be.
Because in times of disruption, you can choose to be remarkable—or you can accept irrelevance.
We’ve made our choice.
