Alex Rhea, chief technology officer and co-founder of Takt, likes to talk about performance management rather than labor management. That's because, in the warehouse, real-time data, aided by artificial intelligence, can bring continuous improvement in both performance and worker morale.

“I think we’re seeing a lot of organizations get leaner.,” Rhea says. “It’s no joke that 2023 was a tough year for everybody, and we saw a lot of trimming, not only of the operators on the floor, but also the engineers.”

A lot of organizations have turned to third-party logistics providers to help them deliver goods faster to their customers, and some of the leanness of those organizations is now being adopted by retailers, too, Rhea argues. “So they’re needing better tools to do more with less, and to get insights faster and spend less time with spreadsheets and more time taking action on the floor.”

AI is now moving beyond computer vision and robotics, toward generative AI and large language models. These tools can, for example, help a manager provide constructive feedback to an employee. “We take all the information we have about an employee’s performance, along with the manager’s feedback, and provide that in a constructive way that, as an operator, you can actually take action and get better, improve your career,” Rhea says. 

And, of course, it works the other way around. “We try to make sure that managers are held just as accountable as employees, which I don’t think has been true in a lot of the historical approaches.”

Another great benefit of AI is its ability to synthesize vast amounts of data. “One of the things that large language models can do is they’re really good at parsing all of that data, so you can find those opportunities as a manager or warehouse leader to make sure you’re getting right to the heart of the issue, rather than staring at tens of thousands of rows of data.”