Panelists (CONT’D FROM PAGE 1)
EDI or having to get specialized people to do EDI or just a hard process to all of a sudden it's ‘Hey, we need to do EDI implementation and let's fire this up and oh my gosh, watch how it just takes off and it shows me how to do it and oh look, it already documented everything.’ And when it's all done, there's a perfect log and record of it and then when the next guy comes along, it's already there. So just taking away all of that busy work that's just necessary to do it right and still let them move forward and be excited, that's a big win that I've seen within our team. Pickering: The greatest implementation I've seen is at the senior managers level when we're having these huge meetings with 16, 18, 20 people. The meetings are all being recorded and within 15 minutes of com- ing out of the C-suite, AI has composed everything that we were talking about, made a summary level and action points before we even get back to the of- fice. Everything's compiled quickly and efficiently. The speed of that is incredible and that has been done at no cost, which is absolutely fantastic. Ochi: Can any of you can share a risk that your team has been able to mitigate in the last year and what was really key to making progress against it? Anderson: When we think of risk, we think of availabili- ty and security, not even necessarily in that order. Security is always top of mind. Some of the things we've been do- ing around risk management is really around cybersecuri- ty and user education. We’re really trying to find a way to connect with our end users and make them understand the responsibility that they have to make the right choic- es every day. The bad guys are out there. It's a business for them and they take it seriously. It's an arms race, so anything we can do to stay on the defense and educate the users is good. We've been spending a lot of time get- ting up to speed, doing specific employee sessions, even bringing in the FBI. Medof: We've been very focused on upping our game around safety over the last eight months, and I think any- body involved in the business of safety knows that it's a continuous journey. Where we've really upped our game in the last months is focusing on behavioral-based safe- ty. Things that are very tangible, like engineer, hazard re- duction and engineered controls, those are very easy to understand and they're very tangible by their very nature. Behavioral-based safety, on the other hand, building a culture of awareness of safety all the way down to the line operator level, is very challenging and it requires a real cultural emphasis, cultural shift and constant work and dil- igence. Ochi: Les, I know we've spoken in the past about some Les Pickering
Medof: It’s no surprise that AI has been front and cen- ter. Dispersing AI development down to the lowest possi- ble level seems to be a best practice, obviously subject
to all the right security pre- cautions and controls. But at the user level, AI is real- ly enhancing productivity. I'll give just one example. One thing that we've seen in our business is the abil- ity to run ad hoc analyses. Things that would have taken an analyst, typical- ly a very qualified analyst or somebody with a col-
Billy Medof
lege degree and several years of business experience to run these types of analytics. Now these can be run at the user level, on the operations side, on the commercial side, on the sales and go-to-market side. The ability to run these analyses with the LLM of your choice, whether that's ChatGPT or Quad or Gemini, it really doesn't matter. For these purposes, all of them seem to be quite helpful and effective at running ad hoc analyses that are, frankly, astonishing me in their ability to identify pricing opportu- nities, margin improvement opportunities, labor savings opportunities, waste reduction opportunities, you name it. I would just encourage everybody to just dive in and start playing around. It's real low risk, real low downside, and the benefits that we've seen have been impressive. Anderson: I'm on the technology side, and one of the things that we've done recently is partner with some of our sheet feeders on the corrugated side and we’ve gotten a lot more IoT data. And what's fascinating to me is it's not a new thing. This stuff has been around for a while, but the reason I say that's a success for us is my
IT team, and a lot of the teams, is that they want to participate. You get into IT because you want to solve problems, and sometimes it's really hard sometimes to see problems out on the plant floor and not be able to have an impact. It was a win because sometimes in operations you get so busy fulfilling
Christopher Anderson
the daily orders it’s difficult to take a step back and look through the lens of innovation to do things differently, be- ing willing to change and learn. Hopefully we can capital- ize on that. Keslin: I think the one thing that stands out for me is watching our team use IT to teach themselves and gain confidence to do things that they had never done before. I've watched our IT team go from not really understanding
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24 October 26, 2026
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