EP. 51 Building Smarter Logistics with AI with Gary Dowdy
EP. 51 Building Smarter Logistics with AI with Gary Dowdy
About This Episode
In this episode, Matt sits down with Gary Dowdy, Chief Technology Officer at Trinity Logistics, one of North America’s leading freight brokerage firms. Gary shares his fascinating career journey through warehouse automation, mobile banking, and seven years helping build the JB Hunt 360 digital freight marketplace before landing at Trinity. Together, they explore how Trinity is leveraging cloud infrastructure, agentic AI, and voice automation to transform freight operations, handling over 80,000 minutes of AI carrier conversations in a single month. Gary also offers candid insights on governing AI adoption, keeping data ready for what’s next, and why strong leadership and human connection remain the most important ingredients in an increasingly automated industry.
Know the Guests

Gary Dowdy
Chief Technology Officer at Trinity Logistics
Gary Dowdy is the Chief Technology Officer at Trinity Logistics, a leading freight brokerage firm. With over two decades of experience in technology leadership, Gary has built a career at the intersection of software engineering, logistics, and digital transformation. He began his journey studying Computer Science Engineering at the University of Arkansas, and moved into warehouse automation and systems integration.
Know Your Host
Matt Pacheco
Sr. Manager, Content Marketing Team at TierPoint
Matt Pacheco. Sr. Manager, Content Marketing Team at TierPoint. Matt leads the content marketing team at TierPoint, where his keen eye for detail and deep understanding of industry dynamics is instrumental in crafting and executing a robust content strategy. He excels in guiding IT leaders through the complexities of the evolving cloud technology landscape, often distilling intricate topics into accessible insights. Passionate about exploring the convergence of AI and cloud technologies, Matt engages with experts to discuss their impact on cost efficiency, business sustainability, and innovative tech adoption. As a podcast host, he offers invaluable perspectives on preparing leaders to advocate for cloud and AI solutions to their boards, ensuring they stay ahead in a rapidly changing digital world.
Transcript
00:00 — Gary's Career Journey
Matt Pacheco
And welcome to Cloud Currents, a podcast that navigates the ever-changing seas of cloud computing, cybersecurity and emerging tech. I'm your host, Matt Pacheco and I lead the content marketing team here at TierPoint, where I help businesses understand cloud and security trends to help better make decisions about their IT strategy. Today's episode takes us into the interesting world of freight and logistics, an industry rapidly transformed by cloud technology, AI automation, data driven operations, and so on. Joining us today is Gary Dowdy, chief technology officer at Trinity Logistics, one of North America's leading freight brokerage firms. Gary brings a fascinating career journey spanning warehouse automation, mobile banking, fitness, fintech, and Now Freight, including seven years at JB Hunt, where helped build JB Hunt 360 into a top digital freight marketplace. And he'll talk probably a little bit about that in our conversation today.
We'll explore how Trinity is leveraging cloud infrastructure and agentic AI to transform their freight operations, what it really takes to get your data ready for AI, and how companies can govern AI adoption without stifling their innovation or growth. So, Gary, welcome to Cloud Currents and thank you for being on with us today.
Gary Dowdy
Hey, thanks Matt. Great to be here.
Matt Pacheco
Awesome. So let's go right into it. Tell us a little bit about your journey in tech and in cloud and how you got to where you are today.
Gary Dowdy
Oh, gosh, I'm going to go back a little ways, but graduated from the University of Arkansas with a computer science degree and actually went straight into as an entrepreneur with a really good friend. Started and got into barcoding and warehouse automation. That led me into a career at Cardinal Health for 10 years with their e commerce program. And then more luck than anything landed on the, I guess the cusp of mobile banking with the software firm off the west coast that needed help with implementation. And so at that point it was, you know, mobile web, mobile app and SMS banking and got to be a part of introducing mobile banking to more than 40 financial institutions across North America. Traveling a ton.
And so I decided it was probably time to be at home more with my wife and kids, which was the right thing to do. And it worked out great. I ended up at JB Hunt where I spent seven great years being a part of a fantastic team working on JB Hunt360. And then of course, that road led me to where I am today.
Matt Pacheco
You helped JB Hunt. You were there for seven years and you helped build the JB Hunt360 Marketplace. Tell us a little bit about that and the learnings you Learn from that experience.
Gary Dowdy
It was just a great period of time of growth from an engineering technology team. I think were at 300, 350 team members. At one point were way over 1500 team members and that was, were start over. It was, it was just a great period of growth. We went from about 350 people within the technology and engineering organization to more than 1500. In part, in large part due to a get off the mainframe of trying to modernize the core operating system at the same time launching, you know, JB Hunt360 not only to customers but also to carriers and do things like load matching and creating a load board. So it's just a great experience to be part of that modernization effort and a lot of great tools and people that I got to work with along the way.
03:56 — Cloud Modernization at Trinity
Matt Pacheco
Excellent. Speaking of modernization, I know you mentioned a little bit about migrating and modernizing at JB Hunt and now you're doing some of that at Trinity as well. From what I understand. What does, from a high level view in your industry, what does cloud modernization typically look like for your infrastructure and what are some of the priorities that are the most important for you when you're looking to modernize an infrastructure like that?
Gary Dowdy
Yeah, for Trinity I inherited, so I'm fairly new to the organization, but the engineering team had already moved a majority of all the systems from on prem to cloud sitting in aws. For us, the next iteration is to break up some of the monolithics into, you know, macro microservices where appropriate. Some of them are already containerized, but what's not containerized will get containerized and obviously from there, you know, leverage the orchestration of kubernetes principally for two reasons. One is resilience and scale. And so what I like to say is that, you know, from a scalability standpoint, you know, you have busy, you know, Mondays are always busier than Friday. Spring and fall are sometimes busier than winter and summer. And so what's great about kubernetes, it allows the system to automatically scale up and scale down as appropriate.
So you're not wasting resources or compute when it's, you know, less busy.
Matt Pacheco
Interesting. And how did you make decisions around, I guess when you're doing all this modernization, what stays or what goes into the public cloud versus what stays on prem, if anything at all? Like how do you make that decision when you're looking at your workloads and your infrastructure?
Gary Dowdy
Back to the resiliency and scale question. So there are a few of the Last things that are on prem, but it will all get moved to the cloud.
Matt Pacheco
Great. So moving to the cloud, that's modernization. Speaking of modernization, we're all talking about AI adoption and agentic AI and all of these interesting new technologies and use cases for AI. How do you see AI working in your industry or how, what are the biggest uses of AI potentially in your industry?
06:09 — AI in the Freight Industry
Gary Dowdy
I would say the industry's already has been undergoing a digital transformation, you know, for the least the last 10 or so years. I mean, freight was pretty late to the game with respect to using technology to become more efficient. AI just speeds that up even more. So and so, you know, you're looking at, you know, how do you move a shipment from point A to point B? And it's all about the cost to serve while maintaining, you know, a great level of customer service, always knowing where that load is and being able to enable alerting and exceptions if something is not right. And so normal automation plays a great role there. AI can just take it to the next level.
Matt Pacheco
Have you deployed any AI specific tools?
Gary Dowdy
Yeah, a number of tools. Probably the top of mine would be around voice interaction of, you know, we get thousands and thousands of inbound calls a day from carriers looking for freight, looking to, you know, get a price on a freight, make an offer on a freight, negotiate, et cetera. So we have robots that take those calls or hand them off to a person if appropriate. But also we'll negotiate the price with the carrier and even book the load in most cases. And so, gosh, last month I think we did about 80,000 minutes of conversation with carriers using that type of automation.
Matt Pacheco
Wow, that's a lot. How do you get to a point of getting a solution like that? Because from what I understand there's a lot of data implications of implementing AI agents and solutions like that. Can you walk us through how that system works and how it, what it took to actually get that to where it is today?
Gary Dowdy
Yeah, credit to the business. I mean they were reacting to a problem. It first started with just after hours of being able and having somebody available to answer the phone call, you know, for non peak peak hours. And while we staff for 24, seven, you know, sometimes you get more phone calls than you can handle. And so that was the first use case is like, what if we could put, you know, an intelligent agent there to be able to take the call, get it on the first ring, see if we can solve their problem, you know, immediately without having to transfer over to a human agent.
And of course with all that logic was an escalation point that if, you know, tone of voice goes negative, if you can tell there's frustration or if it's some issue that obviously needs immediate attention, then the system hands it off to a human operator. And so lessons learned from that off hours preceded us to take, you know, carry inbound for load board calls and covering freight. And we started at one office and then of course rolled it out across the United States.
Matt Pacheco
Was there any resistance at first when it came to implementing that? Because going from human to agent, AI agent, I can envision some resistance or some apprehension from leadership team or from teams. Did you experience some of that?
Gary Dowdy
Well, you know, from an internal, the message has always been about look, if we can automate the mundane and allow our carrier rest to spend more time to, you know, pre find capacity, you know, spend more time building those carrier relationships, covering the freight as appropriately, handling the difficult conversations, the difficult loads, then it's a free time for everybody. And so that's been really, this intelligent assist has been our mantra from the get go and almost think of it as like every carrier rep has an intern by their side and that intern is the robotic process handling the easy stuff, you know, drive in one pick, one drop so that the carrier rep can focus more on the carrier, the customer and covering the complicated freight.
Then on then on the carrier side, I will tell you most of those conversations the carrier is oblivious to the fact that they're talking to a robot. The technology has just gotten so good. But there are people that, you know, in certain scenarios they can tell they're talking to robot, they either will get really frustrated with them and in that case, like I said, we'll immediately do a hand, warm handoff back to a rep because we want to reinforce like we still are a very people centric freight business and we want a human in the loop all the time.
Matt Pacheco
Were there any concerns when implementing such a tool about security and the potential for risk when it comes to some of that?
Gary Dowdy
No, absolutely. That was, you know, a big part of the prompting on the front end. And also how we wired up the APIs is to make sure that, you know, the right guardrails are in place and also try to avoid any type of denial of service or any other hack attempts.
Matt Pacheco
In the past you've mentioned, it feels like an arms race and freight brokerage where productivity per employee is becoming a key competitive metric. How does Trinity think about the balance between the speed of AI adoption and getting that right?
Gary Dowdy
I'M glad you mentioned that. Obviously there's a lot in the press about how AI is making every company more efficient and their ability to perhaps even lay off people. You know for Trinity we've been in growth mode. We've actually been in growth mode even you know, post Covid and so it's great and to be an organization that's still growing and so you know what we want to do is decouple that growth from headcount. So it's just. So it's not you know, the same ratio is that we want to be able to grow faster than add headcount but we still see people being centric to everything we do. But back to the arms race.
I think what I said earlier, it comes back to cost to serve customers vote wallet and we have to continuously find a way to become more efficient every day and you know, through the use of technology and other methods is how we want to stay relevant.
Matt Pacheco
What role does AI play beyond the voice interaction use case? Do you have any other instances using like as predictive analytics or data driven decision making at Trinity?
Gary Dowdy
Yeah, the others back to the. The things that are super manual today is we still get a lot of orders that come in through emails. So you know an RPA on top of those emails, processing those automatically enter them into our tms makes a ton of sense because again that's mundane work that you know, our account managers can spend more time with the customer and more time understanding the markets and pricing better rather than just you know, grabbing an email and entering in. So those that process is certainly in place. With respect to bid boards, we have APIs and RPAs that bid on thousands of loads per day based on metrics that we set so that we have a certain set of margin expectations, lanes that we want to cover, lanes that we don't want to cover.
So all those components are built into those robots. And then last to your point on the pricing and analytics, I would say that is really the ultimate goal is to get to where you can price to market on a daily basis and set your margin expectations, understand what's going on in the carrier market and adjust appropriately and then have that rear view mirror to where you learn from yesterday, you learn from last week and you just get better the next day.
Matt Pacheco
Excellent. Are there any concerns I guess about the pricing model of some of these AI tools and the potential for them to change at some point in the future as companies need to monetize and all that?
Gary Dowdy
Well, I'm sure You've no, I mean this, we haven't seen Moore's Law yet, right to where things are getting faster and cheaper. I mean, price has gone down in some areas, but you know, most of the vendors that, you know, we work with, that I've talked to as well, their prices are all going up. And you know, the cost of tokenization because of the sophistication is consuming more compute and getting more expensive. And that to me is where you have to make a smart decision on the buy versus build is how do you contain and control your costs? What are the things that are your secret sauce to where you can protect margin? Because if your external costs keep going up, at some point you're going to have to make a choice what you can't afford or can't afford.
Matt Pacheco
Very nice. So we're talking about AI. We talked a little bit about data. So you've talked about the foundation of AI at Trinity, which is data integrity, master data governance. Those all have to come first. Where do you see Trinity on that journey and what gaps are you actively closing right now to make sure you get to your end goal?
Gary Dowdy
We have great master data today from a customer standpoint and obviously with carrier and MC numbers, you have lots of information around there. I think the next step is just getting smarter about lanes, customer preferences, location information. So while most places you have geofence for a location, but there's a lot more metadata and a lot more sophistication that can go with just understanding all those components. And then fast forward a few years and even it's happening today with autonomous vehicles. But you know, what changes when you're, you know, instead of going one pick, one drop, you're going hub to hub. And so it's still one pickup, one drop off. But the dynamics have changed because of how you're having to hand off with another entity.
And so I think those become, you know, all part of how you use data to make sure you're pricing right and know where your competitive strengths are.
16:20 — Shadow AI and Governance
Matt Pacheco
So let's talk a little bit about shadow AI. There's a, For a long time we've concerned, we've been concerned about shadow it, but now there's a new kind of flavor of it where there's shadow AI becoming kind of a real concern for a lot of leaders that we speak to and that we hear from employees using personal ChatGPT accounts, running unsanctioned pilots or pilots feeding sensitive data into public tools. That's happening all the time. How do you address that at Trinity?
Gary Dowdy
Yeah, I was about to say every CTO CIOs, you know, main concern is data leakage and it's, you know, those usually occur from internal more than they do from the external. And so it's first part, it's education of making sure that, you know, we encourage citizen development. If you want to use chat, GPT or cloud co work to go do something great, make sure you're using our version and our protected version, not your personal one, and uploading contracts and other sensitive data to the public domain. And so that's number one. Number two then with that citizen development is, you know, the myth of being able to put something together in two days and then it's production ready for a billion dollar company. There's, you know, there's a gap between those two things.
And so what we're working on is more process of how do we surface those great ideas and then bring them into the engineering organization so we can productionize them and put those things in the hands of all users.
Matt Pacheco
So in doing that and ensuring people aren't doing a bunch of shadow AI, how do you balance between having a governance and making sure people aren't feeling restricted by some of that governance?
Gary Dowdy
Culturally, I think it's different. Matt. We're not a large organization, so I would think if you're somebody with 20,000 employees, 30,000 employees, you're probably at a different place than we are. And so from a culture standpoint, we've very healthy understanding of cybersecurity and the importance of data and protecting our data. So that really hasn't been an issue for us. I think it's more of what's the right balance of how do we get these capabilities in the hands of all our end users with respect to this changing so fast, I mean, we've been doing a ton with Claude Cowork within the engineering organization and we want to expose that to our leadership team and our general managers. The capabilities are coming out every day, so it's hard to keep up.
But also there's, you know, there's tweaking and tuning that goes to these systems where it makes it difficult to say, all right, I'm going to go give this to a hundred people and it's going to work the same way for all 100 people. That's the piece where I'm excited as this technology matures and our ability to really cascade it to the hands of all users.
Matt Pacheco
You're right about it changing so rapidly and quickly. Like I think it was what last week where ChatGPT or OpenAI announced they're killing their video generation and they're focusing more on kind of the enterprise use case of their tool. So coding and all that great stuff. So that's really. Yeah, it's moving quick and it's hard to keep up. How do you, how do you keep up on some of these new advancements is. How do you regularly stay on top of that?
Gary Dowdy
Because it's difficult. Fortunately, I have a smart team that's a lot smarter than I am and that's the, you know, job number one twos read a lot. But I will tell you just my personal experience with chat, GPT, Copilot and cloud code. You know, by far, chat and cloud are way superior than anything from Copilot we've seen. And then recently as, and you see just in the trade rags is Claude code is just phenomenally good and getting better every day. It's just, it's a fantastic tool. I agree.
Matt Pacheco
I've seen it in action and it's quite something.
Gary Dowdy
I mean, we take like our tech news, our freight news daily is compiled by cowork every day. And you know, and we tell it, you know, no more than six pages. It summarizes that and we distribute that out and then weekly we have it run a full market intelligence. So where's the market going? What are our competitors doing? How do we measure ourselves? You know, revenue per load, revenue person, that type of stuff. It's just amazing the amount of data it can collect and the quick synthesis it does to save us time. So now we're working with information as opposed to just looking at a bunch of data.
Matt Pacheco
That's really cool. And it sounds like from the way you speak about it and some of the things you're doing at Trinity, you kind of have a culture around using some of this latest technology and adopting it. So it sounds really interesting how open you guys are to embracing that world.
So you've noted that Trinity's kind of entrepreneurial culture makes change management a little easier than at larger competitors. What does that actually look like on the ground when you're rolling out something like voice AI system to your carrier team?
Gary Dowdy
Oh, gosh. It's a loaded question. You know, like most logistics firms, there's a lot of people that have been here for 10, 15, 20 years. So sure, you have people that are used to using a certain system in a certain way. What's been one real refreshing component of coming to Trinity is the entrepreneurial spirit, is the leadership down to, you know, the fields. They're not afraid to try new things and do new ways. And in fact, one of the things I had to do when I came in is put my arms around, you know, how much external stuff we're going to do just because it gets unweld, either to keep up with it, to integrate it, to maintain it and so forth.
And so there's no issue, at least from a culture standpoint, on how to leverage something new to better serve the customer, better help the carrier.
23:21 — Moving Pilots into Production
Matt Pacheco
Excellent. Mentioned it a little earlier. Moving pilots into production. It's a challenge that everyone's talking about. It's a big pain point. How do you what, I guess what's like a framework that you use or guidance that we use when deciding to move a proof of concept with your team to an enterprise grade solution, like your voice AI system for instance.
Gary Dowdy
Yeah. You start small and then create a wedge and then you roll it out so much like we did that voice interaction which is now rolled out across our different locations. I would say dynamic pricing is the next frontier for us. And again, we'll pilot that in a couple of specific locations, collect metrics of like, what does our current pricing system do today? What does this new system do? What's the difference between the two? To make sure we're capturing qualitative and quantitative data and then we can make a decision on do we expand that pilot to the next set of users and so forth. And you know, the nice thing is, you know, with the wisdom of the crowd you get, the more people we get, you know, hands on keyboard and get to interact with these new tools, they just get better.
Matt Pacheco
Very cool. Hands on keyboards. Speaking of hands on keyboards, that's a lot of talent, a lot of skill at your organization. You're running. In a whole IT organization, one of the biggest concerns or pain points that a lot of people have is how do I have the right talent to do all this stuff, to do all this new AI adoption, agentic AI while managing your cloud infrastructure, your cybersecurity teams. Like there's a lot going on and a lot for a CTO to be responsible for and making sure the right team's in place. How do you attract and retain strong talent when you're competing with a lot of other companies who are trying to do the same thing? Like we're talking about every company's an IT or every company is a tech company these days.
Now how do you compete for, for that strong talent to keep you guys doing all this great stuff?
Gary Dowdy
First is culture, right? The Trinity's, you know, been in business for 50 years and has a fantastic history, fantastic culture. And so we win on culture first, right? So it's more than just, you know, the salaries we collect and the things we do. It's the people we work with that really make the difference. And so culture would be number one, two to be a part then of, you know, shared goals, of making a difference of, you know, changing how the freight brokerage business works. How do we help, you know, help our customers become more efficient in moving freight. And obviously, you know, lately there's a lot going on in the supply chain world. And so, you know, customers really do appreciate if there's a certain area of their life that's consistent.
Matt Pacheco
There is, there is a lot going on in your world right now. Let's, let's talk a little bit about the future and what that looks like between AI and cloud and talent. We've talked about a lot of these things, getting data ready. How do you see your world changing, let's say, in the next five years from where you are today with the projects you're working on to how it's looking in the future?
Gary Dowdy
Probably a couple of slices of that, Matt. One, I would say the amount of freight that you can do person is obviously, it's going up, it has to go up. That's an existential threat for any brokerage. And so that means the number of loads that can move through your system with virtually no touch and then have the right systems and mechanisms so that if something goes wrong, obviously customer and carriers want to know by exception when they need to pay attention to something. And so having the right, you know, infrastructure and system in place to know when an exception occurs, how to act on that exception is paramount. But it's going to be that velocity of number of loads that can move through the system. No touch. That'd be point one. Point two is you. There are not. Everything's a dry van or reefer.
One pick one drop right there. There are some very complicated, you know, moving a crane across multiple states is a very complicated process. Or moving a windmill, you know, from coast to coast is a very complicated process. And so you can't automate everything. We don't desire to go automate everything, but what we do want to do is again, you know, make sure that all our operators have that intern working for them so that they can focus on the important stuff and not on all the stuff. That's, that's one. And then on the true tech side, obviously voice. I don't know when you're working with Claude or Chad or whatever, you know, I find myself talking a whole lot more than typing these days just because the voice response has gotten so good.
So fast forward five years I think you'll see that dramatically be different just how much we're using our voice to get things done and then autonomous depending on the regulatory environment. That has profound implications. Right on capacity and how capacity works and how you move freight, which is something we all are keeping an eye on.
Matt Pacheco
Interesting. How do you see. We talked a little about talent and culture. How do you see AI changing the nature of jobs at companies like yours? Not just like Headcount, but like what it looks like working day to day.
Gary Dowdy
I was trying to think of a book that I read. Oh gosh, give me a second. We're have to clip this one. But, but oh gosh, no. So it reminds me of Dale Carnegie. Right. How to Win friends and influence people. It still comes back to communication skills that you know, the world still is relationships. You still need to be able to treat people with respect and wanted to be treated with respect. So I think all those human qualities become more important than ever to be able to communicate, collaborate. Whether it's inside your or an organization or with your vendors, your partners, your customers and your carriers. Those are the skill sets we're looking for as people that can really work well with people.
Matt Pacheco
Excellent. Great answer. Cloud costs AI costs rising quickly. We talked, we talked a little bit about everything rising cost. Do you have a long term strategy for managing costs as the technology matures?
Gary Dowdy
I wish I had a crystal ball there. We're hopeful. Right. Some of the things like we saw like openclaw, how it changes the view of the world within a matter of weeks or months, you know there are going to be more breakthroughs that I do believe that change the rules that drop the price that maybe perhaps we don't need as many data centers as that we're trying to go build today. But it's unknown. So the only thing you can do is is plan for change because that is for sure going to happen.
Matt Pacheco
Absolutely. We, it's changed so quickly in the last six months that we've talked about it a little. That change is so rapid. So it's interesting to hear from organizations like how are you thinking about this and how are you going to adapt if prices go through the roof. So thank you for your answer. Another question, more of a higher level question that get us thinking what's one thing the broader logistics and transportation industry is getting wrong about cloud and AI and what should it be doing differently to approach those technologies?
Gary Dowdy
I think the answer is not so much about cloud and AI is it is about collaboration and eliminating waste. There's a lot of waste in the movement of goods from the lack of interaction between scheduling systems, dock doors, planning. We're still in an industry that uses EDI a tremendous amount. Right. And we, and we all know that APIs are much more effective to use, more resilient, more real time. And so still while we've been talking about just think about visibility, we've been talking control Towers for 10, 15 years. But yet the number one issue we still have is where's our freight? And make sure that somebody's not trying to steal our freight.
And so to me it's, it's the industry collaboration that's required from within the industry partners and our government to make sure that we have the tools in place to where we're not all spending a significant amount of our time on fraud prevention. It should be done collectively as a system. So where we're not having to worry about cargo theft to the point that we are today, that's just totally non productive.
Matt Pacheco
Yeah, I can imagine that's a huge issue in parts of the world. Do you see AI or any innovative technology being able to potentially address some of those problems or challenges?
Gary Dowdy
Well, to me it's the basics. It's back just collaboration, data sharing and some simple automation. We go a really long ways.
Matt Pacheco
So what advice would you give to a CEO kind of looking to do some of the things you're doing in their industry or in your industry. Some advice you would give to them if they're looking into AI infrastructure or cloud infrastructure modernization, what's some advice you would give to them as they embark on a similar journey?
Gary Dowdy
I think leadership matters more today than it ever has. Back to our conversation, Matt, just around change.
And change management of as an organization and you know, how do you protect your culture? How do you protect your people? What are the right things to go do and what's the one thing that you should be doing as opposed to be doing all these things? And so leadership sets the tone at the top. What's important, what are priorities first and foremost. And then the other would be this is not something that you can ignore. People are going to, you know, go to work at companies that are embracing, adapting and using this technology because they know that things are going to change as a result. And so from a leadership standpoint, I would encourage you to act, to go try, go iterate.
Matt Pacheco
Awesome. That's great advice. One last question for you, the most fun one. What are you most excited for in the next, say five to 10 years when it comes to the tech space in general?
Gary Dowdy
Oh, well, we covered a lot of that.
33:44 — The Future of Tech and AI
Matt Pacheco
Yeah, a lot of cool stuff. What's the one you're personally excited about the most?
Gary Dowdy
It's the Jarvis. Right. It's having this personal assistant that really is contextually aware of everything and you know, not so much about like booking your travel, you know, that'd be nice. And making sure your calendars, you know, done right and that you haven't missed any important one ones or updates. It's more that always on pervasive that helps you just be smarter and actually be a better person. So much of this stuff we've talked about business productivity, you know, we didn't spend much time talking about just how do we be our better selves as a result of this. And I think Mark Cuban, you know, was on TV a couple of weeks ago, you know, saying there's two types of people.
There will little people that will learn from this type of technology and make themselves better and others that will get lazy and just let the system do it for themselves. I look forward to the former of how do we use this capability, just become better as people.
Matt Pacheco
The opportunities are endless. I was just actually talking to my wife the other day about this and how it's similar to like Google and how when Google first came out there were people who kind of forgot everything and just relied on Google. And then there's others who leverage the tool to become smarter, to constantly learn and do interesting things. And I see a lot of parallels with AI, which generative AI and all that.
Gary Dowdy
I couldn't spell all that well before Google and certainly not after.
Matt Pacheco
There's still, when I do some research for keywords and content, there's still a lot of misspells that we rank for. It's really funny but yeah, they don't need to spell anymore. Anyways, I wanted to thank you for being on the episode. We learned a lot, we talked about a lot. So appreciate your time.
Gary Dowdy
Thanks for having me on the show, Matt. Appreciate it, yeah.
Matt Pacheco
And for our listeners, thank you for tuning in. You can find Cloud Currents wherever you get your podcasts and stay tuned for more great content. From great companies like Trinity, so thank you.

