George Jagodzinski (00:00):

Today we talk about the evolution of data from static to dynamic, the failed global language of Esperanto and the legacy of the Sears catalog and the fact that it's still seen in the supply chain patterns we experience today. I'm joined by John Abrams, who over the last two decades has amassed a wealth of experience of Fortune 500 organizations such as McDonald's and Cardinal Health. He's led partnerships and joined initiatives with MIT Media Lab and has worked closely with DeepTech Ventures at the University of Chicago. Somehow, John still finds time to do other things. He's now the founder and CEO of Nutrād, a supply chain software company that leverages AI to enable more meaningful communication and trade across the globe. They're essentially the Rosetta Stone of supply chain and they're doing some real stuff with AI, not just the marketing nonsense. So please welcome John.

(00:46):

Welcome to Evolving Industry, a no BS podcast about business leaders who are successfully weaving technology into their company's DNA to forge a better path forward. If you're looking to actually move the ball forward rather than spinning around in a tornado of buzzwords, you're in the right place. I'm your host, George Jagodzinski. John, thanks so much for being here.

John Abrams (01:24):

Hey, great to be here.

George Jagodzinski (01:26):

So we're going to talk about a lot of things today, but one thing that really got me excited is you talked about data not being static anymore. What does that mean?

John Abrams (01:34):

For as long as our generation or the generation surrounding us have dealt with computing, we have dealt with data in a very static way. I deal with a lot of product data, and so you think about the data that describes a product like a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Data in the early days of computing, and I'll only go back to like the 1960s, 1970s, data didn't even involve an image. Even though today an image is ones and zeros, right? It's data. But even in the 1970s, people didn't think of images as data. And what you thought of as data was like the name of the product, Kraft Mac and Cheese.

(02:24):

You'd put that in a database with very rigid parameters, like it was 256 characters or it was alpha or it was numeric or alphanumeric, and so data was this like very rigid thing and it was static. Like once you describe the Kraft Mac and Cheese, you sort of didn't touch that again, regardless of what other external factors were acting on that data or the needs to improve it, like does it have red dye in it? Static data to me has been this like... Ah, it's like a manhole cover. It's really heavy and hard to move and hard to deal with, and I think we're finally getting away from the idea of data is static and data can now be acted upon by lots of different things. Like hey, there's a recall, or hey, the box has imagery in motion and there's consumer benefit to that data. Once you start thinking that way, know consumers involved with your product data, it gets really interesting in a non-static and non-linear fashion.

George Jagodzinski (03:38):

That makes sense. I can already see how that then layers up the chain where it's dynamic data now allows you to have a more dynamic product, which allows you to have a more dynamic relationship with your end customers and it just allows the business to be more nimble overall. I'm curious, how have you seen that manifest?

John Abrams (03:56):

I've been in supply chain for a long time and at Cardinal Health dealt with product data on sort of a massive global scale, 650,000 active SKUs from all over the world and every medical product manufacturer you can think of. The supply chain has been sort of limited in its use. Hey, there's a truck coming into the yard, it needs to be unloaded, how do we know? Well, we see it. So even the digital information of flows across the supply chain physically and digitally have been kind of limited. What I see happening is that as somebody wants to know if my baby food is in recall status, you're now starting to open up a dialogue or conversation about trust between the consumer and your brand.

(04:52):

And I think that has significant and massive implications for how we think about data across the supply chain. So right now when you say how do I see that or what things are we encountering, we're still in a theoretical what happens when consumers enter the supply chain. But with the number of recalls, it's getting less theoretical and more why are you not sharing information that I need to know before I feed my baby?

George Jagodzinski (05:27):

This isn't a supply chain podcast, but I am so intrigued by supply chain, especially from a data perspective because it's just such a massive use case in needing to send data from so many different disparate sources and to so many disparate destinations. It makes its way all the way through to the consumer. And you and I geeked out about this a little bit before, but I used to work in this space in the global data synchronization network and there was supposed to be this data standard that everyone could agree on how you send information across. And on paper you would think it would be to everyone's benefit to speak the same data standard, but it didn't work for some reason. And as I was preparing for this, I was thinking of what are the human reasons behind that? It reminded me of Esperanto, the language that was supposed to be the universal global language and it didn't happen and that wasn't a technology reason, right? So I'm curious, with all your decades of experience, what are your opinions on what leads to those standards not really taking hold?

John Abrams (06:31):

Look, I've sat on the Global Standards board for years out of Belgium, so GS1. I'm a big fan of standards, but the problem is everybody has one. I'll pick on my Cardinal Health days. I thought that because Cardinal Health, a really big company, in the United States has a lot of buying power, it's a distributor and massive, and I thought, well, I'm the 800 pound gorilla. Until you meet a bigger gorilla, and so my standard works for what I do at Cardinal Health up until there's somebody that's got their own standard and they're bigger, and then you've got conflict where you can't reconcile those things. And the standards, they're an impediment. There's good to standards, and so I sound like I'm arguing against myself and I'm not. There are reasons to align on the character sets and things like that, but that's already been done. The TCP/IP standard allows us to in fact have this conversation. So there is a-

George Jagodzinski (07:41):

And even surf.

John Abrams (07:41):

That's right. Good friend. I very much believe that standards that allow communication are important. It's just when you try and tell Kraft, and I hate to pick on Kraft all day, but good Chicago institution. It's good to have a standard that says product description, but Kraft might call it something different and you have to reconcile what Kraft calls product description with product description in order to trade. In theory you could impose a standard and make everybody do it, but it doesn't work. And so if you've got communication, say TCP/IP that allows the communication to happen, really what we're talking about is translation between one entity and the next.

(08:28):

So standards are good. Translation between standards is even better and I don't think we've had the capacity, the compute capacity to do that until fairly recently, and that to me is as exciting as the early stages of the internet. For those of us that can name Vint Cerf and people like that, the early stages of the internet were kind of the way I feel about data and fluidity of data today is that it's going to open up really big things. I just can't imagine what they all are.

George Jagodzinski (09:06):

I love the way that you explain that because I think what you're honing in on is the problem to solve there is not the data standard, it's the communication. It's the understanding... Saying that Esperanto was a symptom trying to solve a problem, it wasn't that we... The problem wasn't we need a universal language. It's that we need to be able to understand each other. You know?

John Abrams (09:26):

That's exactly it. If we can understand each other, if there is a translator, the communication already exists. The protocols and the standards for allowing communication, they're there. Great, wonderful. Now how do we translate that in a way that everybody gets to participate, the consumer gets to participate, the farmer gets to participate. The supply chain to me is just an operational embodiment of the early stages of not so much the internet itself, but as everybody started to build web pages and do transactions on the web, that's great, but it's still kind of limited. And I see what's happening now with the ability to translate at every link in the global communications chain or the global supply chain. If you can translate at each link, you can open participation, deeper levels and more broadly.

George Jagodzinski (10:31):

Evolving Industry is brought to you by Intevity. We bring order to chaos wherever people, process and technology converge. Our culture drives our solutions and we are solution obsessed. We see every challenge as an opportunity, every partner as a collaborator and every project as a chance to share our values and commitment to excellence. Give us a shout, we'd love to hear your challenges and turn them into opportunities. Find out more at Intevity.com. Now, back to the show. I guess I didn't put it together until just now and now I'm going to lead into what you're working on right now.

(11:04):

But when I was walking around Italy and France 20 years ago, I could kind of communicate, not because I spoke the language, but you can point to something, you can kind of make it clear what it is that you're trying to do, but it's not a meaningful conversation. But now with this tiny thing in my ear, I can walk around Spain and I can have a meaningful conversation and maybe what's just clicking in my brain and like let me know if this is an unfair assessment, is that it feels like what you're working on right now is that same equivalent of the earpiece in my ear allowing conversation, but it's applied to the supply chain. Is that correct?

John Abrams (11:38):

Yeah, it is. And some people talk about it as we're the Rosetta Stone of trade, and that's really interesting to me. It's a useful analogy, but my motivation since the early days of the internet was that internet connectivity unlocks trade, it unlocks value, it unlocks new ways to do business. The supply chain is a really important sort of substrate for all of that. It's trade at the most fundamental level, and what I truly believe is that the data around products is more valuable than the product itself. But to actually unlock that value, you have to be able to communicate quickly, easily, and without error across the entirety of the chain.

George Jagodzinski (12:30):

That's really meaningful. That's an interesting way to think about it and I think it is good to bring the conversation back up again because I would like you to give a little overview of what it is that you're working on right now and help us understand it.

John Abrams (12:43):

Yeah, so we've been picking at this or I've been since my days at Cardinal Health. Originally, I went to SAP and I said, "Hey, got a big SAP system. SAP, can you help my trade partners move information to me in a more simplistic way?" And SAP's answer was, "Yeah, no, we don't do that." So I've been on this quest for 20 years to find a way that trade information can move more freely. So what we do at Nutrād, what we've created is a machine learning algorithm that's been trained on massive amounts of product data to interpret any attribute to any other attributes. So, romance copy is actually product description and that's a very simple thing, but there's thousands of attributes that describe any particular product all the way from the ingredients or the fertilizers that a farmer puts on a field before the lettuce goes to dole for distribution.

(13:46):

So there's all these attributes, they have different meaning at each stage of the process of moving a product to market or to consumption. And I really believe that if we can translate each attribute at each stage, do that in real time without people, it allows information to flow more freely and more specifically to the use case at each link in the chain, all the way down to the consumer or even to the return path of that good.

George Jagodzinski (14:17):

That's really interesting. The challenges are large and vast within there and I loved hearing that there's actually "AI" being used for real things and not just marketing nonsense. How has this evolved over time over the last 20 plus years?

John Abrams (14:34):

So, originally I started with standards and some of the standards bodies and some of the data pools as they call them, where manufacturers sort of deposit information into a place and then people come and withdraw that information. It's a very slow, it's a very manual, it's a very outdated process that just, if you want a little bit of history, that actually goes back to the days of Sears and catalogs in the 1890s.

George Jagodzinski (15:08):

Love history.

John Abrams (15:09):

Yeah. Well, cool. Then I'll do just a sidebar on 1890 Sears that came to Chicago for access to rail. So supply chain was really driven by innovation at Sears where they said, "Hey, if we can put our catalog operation in Chicago, you have these printers that lived on the growth of Sears." And Sears was a logistics innovator. They were the Amazon of the 1890s. The funny thing is that the process of supply chain that Sears created in 1890 is really still what Amazon does today, and I have these academic debates with some of my friends that Amazon's just a much more quick Sears and I think that the fact that they don't really do supply chain very well will be the demise of Amazon. And my academic friends get all in a huff about that and they say, "Don't you see their market cap?" And I say, "Yeah, but still."

(16:15):

Sears in the 1890s, you put the saddle in a box, you put the box on a train, you sent it to the wholesaler or retailer or whatever who unpacked the box and put it on a shelf and then the thing got bought or you bought directly from the catalog. Either way, it's this very linear and non-data centric approach. And if you think about saddle to box, box to train, box to shelf, well, what's the reason for data in there? And the answer is, well, you don't really need it. You took it off the box or you took it off the label. Today, I think commerce is very different and yet the approaches to data are still very 1890 centric. If that changes in the near term, hopefully in my lifetime, I think what we're doing becomes really, really important.

George Jagodzinski (17:10):

I love that history. And those patterns, be it supply chain or not, they always stick around for so much longer than anyone can possibly imagine, right?

John Abrams (17:19):

Yeah.

George Jagodzinski (17:19):

I mean, we work with spirits companies that have been around for hundreds of years and manufacturers and there's just a legacy there of how that that went through. I mean from a supply chain perspective, is that then why it goes the pallet case each? Is it the same exact thing that has just carried its way through?

John Abrams (17:37):

The same thing and the other part of that is there's no return path information. So did the horse saddle get sold? I don't know. It's funny, a spirits company came to us fairly recently and said, "Hey, we get these wild swings in consumer behavior that we only know from market research, not from did it move off the shelf. And I used that same story of why don't you know that it moved off the shelf? The supply chain of tradition is one that doesn't care whether you at the manufacturing level got the information that the product sold. That just doesn't care. There's no return path information in today's supply chain. And I think, and my team and people around us really think that return path information makes that data more alive at every point across the chain.

(18:36):

So, not only did you sell the bourbon, but you sold it to a specific person who you can now extend your brand relationship to. And oh by the way, hey, return that bottle in this particular way and there's a benefit to that. We're going to reduce pollution, we're going to reduce waste. There's things that will happen that you and I won't be able to imagine today that once the consumer is connected to the origin or the manufacturer, the brand, different things will happen.

George Jagodzinski (19:09):

Interesting. I'd like to pull the thread on the return path thing because I figure what you said was that the supply chain doesn't care about it, but did the retailers? Because I know it's challenging for the retailers to get that information back. If it was easier, do they care?

John Abrams (19:25):

I think they care. I think you've been around for the early days of the internet. I remember one of my first discussions was at Chicago Tribune and I was presenting with John Gage and Vint Cerf to the Tribune leadership. We were showing them the Sacramento Bee had built some HTML pages, and so you've got all these big powerful people at Chicago Tribune and Tribune Company. They were looking at the Sacramento Bee and they were looking at HTML links and they actually said, "We can see that this would have use in say litigation where you could look up a previous trial or outcome, but it has no bearing on what we do here in media." I take that story because the essence of your question, people tell me all the time, the supply chain works, how do I know I bought Coke at 7-Eleven yesterday?

(20:23):

That is not an indicator that things work, much in the same way that Tribune in all its wisdom in the 1990s could shun the internet as it may apply to legal, but it doesn't have application here. I think that connectivity, that interaction, if you ask a retailer today, Walmart's an exception. But if you ask most retailers what does it matter if you have a more robust connection to your suppliers or to your consumers, and their answer is things are going quite well today, look at our numbers.

George Jagodzinski (21:00):

They're not re-imagining what an entire weekly-

John Abrams (21:02):

Exactly.

George Jagodzinski (21:03):

... how it could completely be. And I would imagine from the consumer it could be a completely different experience from a consumer. It opens up the gateways also to leveraging and owning your own data I would imagine in more interesting ways.

John Abrams (21:15):

I didn't look this week, but typically there's four or five active lettuce recalls in the United States. I don't know if you've got lettuce in your fridge right now, but I guarantee that wherever you bought it didn't reach out to you and say it's good or it's not.

George Jagodzinski (21:31):

No.

John Abrams (21:31):

If you think about that, and sometimes when I do a lecture before lunch, I will say, "I don't know how many of you are going to eat lettuce on your salad or a sandwich come lunchtime, but know this, there are five active lettuce recalls and you don't know about any of them." So, what is that gap in data worth? I suppose if you eat contaminated lettuce and you die, it was worth a whole heck of a lot. So that discussion about do the retailers care? Eh, they care about a 3% growth curve. I get that. If you tell them that you can double your brand value by opening up new ways to communicate and engage your consumers, it's too big to fit in their head. This is the Clay Christensen innovator's dilemma. You can't really go to a retailer and say, "Look, you can do A, B, and C with bidirectional rapid communication supply chain data. You can do these three things and it will grow your market value by X." "Yeah, John, we're just trying to get 3% next year." Cool.

George Jagodzinski (22:49):

That's the challenge, right? Because we're out there in the trenches with these organizations and I walk in there and they... First of all, a lot of their budgets are all aligned to the year, and so therefore their projects are all aligned to the year and they've got a million fires to put out and they're trying to put those fires out while still doing their day job. I always use this example, I'll go to these conferences where we're talking about the future of what can be, and then I'll go back to them in their office and they're like, "George, I can't even get my SKUs straight. I can't even personalize an email. I can't even think about that." How do you think about... 'Cause you've been inside these organizations as well, how do you get the mind shift to change to being more long-term vision, multi-year, let's really rethink things?

John Abrams (23:36):

So I've learned enough about the big story, the big picture, the opportunity. It will get people's attention, but they're not going to buy that. They can't. For all the reasons and more that you've suggested, what I've done better these days is express the high level visionary story and then said, "Let's do this very simple thing that will deliver 3%, 10% return to a very specific part of your organization in the next year." It's not very satisfying. Yeah, I was very dissatisfied at the early days of the internet that I could not show the way forward to the world of media.

(24:23):

I saw it, John Gage, Vint Cerf, Nicholas Negroponte, the Media Lab, we all were on the same page about this is big. It didn't matter. You can't go and sell that big vision into McDonald's directly. You have to start with very bite-sized pieces and I'm okay with that. My belief is that at least for my organization now, is that we are talking big vision and we are delivering things that people can consume and it's working well. If what that does is that an organization that sees our long-term potential gobbles us up at some point, great, that's a win. But I am not under the delusion that I can tomorrow change the supply chain with grand vision. It can't be done.

George Jagodzinski (25:16):

Yeah. Yeah, one bite at a time, even if your patience isn't aligned with that. I know we're talking some old stories, but I remember aligned with catalogs also, Toys "R" Us and it was late nineties and we were just moving into the technology for the first time, and I literally worked on this where we just made a digital catalog that was... You could flip it with the mouse and it was just a page that turned over and I didn't want to do it, but in order to get the buy-in and at least just get something digital, you kind of have to take that first step and then you eat it one bite at a time, right?

John Abrams (25:50):

Yeah. I don't say this a lot. I've mentioned a couple of times the consumer engagement in the supply chain and I will be quite happy if one of our sales leads to experimenting with deeper consumer engagement to the supply chain, and I think we're very close to that. Most of our sales, it's all business to business and they're using it for that. But I do think that we will get a sale to a retailer who will engage in consumer communication in a fundamentally different way than they are today, and we're close.

(26:29):

There are retailers who will send you your receipt digitally even though you didn't ask for it, and you think, "I wonder how that happened." And it happened because Visa or somebody like that has a relationship with that retailer and you checked the box along the way that said, "I'm open to receiving communication from you." If that type of retailer goes the next step and sends a lettuce recall information to a consumer that says, "Hey, this has happened. Throw out your lettuce, here's a coupon. We love you." If that happens and because of the tech that we've built and are selling, I will retire a happy man.

George Jagodzinski (27:17):

Now, do you also put on your fantasy hat and just think about what does the farther off in the future look like? The baby steps are the recalls and the consumer engagement, but let's say this really does progress the way that you hope it does. What does that future look like?

John Abrams (27:33):

Yeah, it's a way more engaged future and even to the returns, and I don't mean my product is flawed, I want to return it. I mean the value chain that can be created when we move beyond, I throw it in the big blue bin and hope that the plastic gets extracted. I think there's more things we can do in reducing return waste that with better engagement from farm or manufacturer all the way to the consumer, I think there's better things that can happen for the world. People shouldn't die because of a lack of communication and people do die because of a lack of communication across the supply chain today. So as much as I want to envision a perfectly circular retail economy based on information flows and directions of what to do with the product when you've finished with it, that's great. Wonderful.

(28:35):

If a child gets saved because they didn't eat glass in the product, that should have been recalled and they should have known about it, that's actually a bigger thing for me than we've unlocked tens of trillions of dollars of economic benefit because the value of a product digitally has more value than the physical product.

George Jagodzinski (28:58):

Yeah, and the economic benefit should come as a side effect of just creating that more meaningful interactions, right?

John Abrams (29:04):

Yeah. When we talk, look, we're incubated at University of Chicago, so I end up in conversations with a lot of big economy thinkers and they talk about the arbitrage of what they can do with the digital doppelganger of a product in arbitrage that you can't do today because of this, that and the other thing. When they model that out, the economic impacts are staggering. Like I don't even believe them, they're so big. I sort of don't care. I really don't, and I talk about recalls a lot because I think we hit the highest number of recalls in the US ever last year.

(29:47):

You only know about the ones that resulted in enough deaths that it made the national news. You and most of your listeners, the same. I know about a lot more of them because I pay attention to the CDC and the FDA feeds that we get, and it's a lot of information, very little of which I can do anything about because the brands who are involved don't have the product. It's not fully installed, it's not operational. They're not our client. I don't really care about the economic impact that happens around the value of the digital product, I care about it helps humanity in a more fundamental way.

George Jagodzinski (30:28):

I'm aligned with that. It makes a lot of sense. And taking it back to that whole Esperanto example, I think I'm huge on common language and anytime that you are speaking in common, it's not that you're speaking in common, but if you can understand each other and communicate, you're going to have more meaningful conversations. They're going to benefit each of you and you're going to just grow together, and if we can carry those conversations down throughout more and more interactions in our life, I think nothing but good things happen from that. Right?

John Abrams (30:57):

I think connectivity, and we've seen this, I think the expansion of the internet has been a global good. There are people that will say, "But there was harm that was created over here and over there." True. There are harms that are created, but overall we are more connected and we are as a society more better because we're more tightly connected. I think the same thing about what we do at Nutrād every day.

George Jagodzinski (31:26):

I love it. Well, John, I could talk about this all day with you. I'd like to finish with one fun question, which is over your years of life and work, what's the best advice you've ever received?

John Abrams (31:37):

It was advice from a friend of mine at MIT and I was very disheartened because some of these big ideas weren't taking hold, and he said, "You can't listen to the people that don't understand."

George Jagodzinski (31:52):

Love that. John, thank you so much for being here.

(31:56):

Thanks for listening to Evolving Industry. For more, subscribe and follow us on your favorite podcast platform and pretty please drop us a review. We'd really appreciate it. If you're watching or listening on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and smash the bell button for notifications. If you know someone who's pushing the limits to evolve their business, reach out to the show at evolvingindustry@intevity.com. Reach out to me, George Jagodzinski on LinkedIn. I love speaking with people getting the hard work done. The business environment's always changing and you're either keeping up or going extinct. We'll catch you next time, and until then, keep evolving.