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Convergence.fmAuthor: Ashok Sivanand
Welcome to the Convergence podcast! I'm Ashok Sivanand and I've created the Convergence podcast to help you build the most engaged product teams who can ship the most successful products. My passion for products and timing stems from a combination of my working in Japanese manufacturing, building IoT software products for lean manufacturers, and working at industry powerhouses in product like Pivotal Labs. This passion led to founding Integral in 2017, a product engineering consultancy that enables our clients to harness technology to develop better products, grow their revenue streams, and enable new business models. We've had the pleasure to collaborate with brands like Ford, Honda, Rocket Mortgage, Airstream, and Bosch to enable their teams and build some amazing products in artificial intelligence, cloud, mobile, and web. On the Convergence podcast, I'll be speaking with industry leaders, as well as sharing insights from my team on deconstructing the best practices, principles, and philosophies that lead to building the best product teams. If you're a chief product officer, a chief technology officer, or a VP of engineering, or you're growing towards one of those roles, I highly recommend you subscribe to the Convergence Podcast and get some of the insights that will help you lead your product teams and enable them to consistently ideate, validate and ship products that your customers love. Products that will help you grow your business. Thanks a lot for listening. Language: en Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship, Management Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
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Speed to Value, Solving a $200K Warehouse Problem With AI in 3 Days
Wednesday, 21 January, 2026
In this episode, I walk through a real, high-stakes moment inside a warehousing and logistics operation, thousands of pallets of telecom cable, a hard year-end deadline, and a task nobody actually owned. The team was facing a potential six-figure hit, measuring precious metal content by hand with clipboards and micrometers, under serious time pressure. During a simple office hours session, we paused, reframed the problem, and realized this wasn't a labor issue at all. It was a vision problem. What followed was a fast, scrappy sprint. Sales, warehouse staff, and engineers worked side by side. We prototyped, tested, and shipped a vision-based AI system in days, not months. Using lightweight tooling, we cut monthly costs by more than $150K, improved measurement accuracy, and delivered a working solution in under 72 hours. If you're skeptical about what "good enough" AI can actually do in the real world, this story is a clean proof point Visit convergence.fm and contact us for to schedule your own office hours and get clarity and confidence tackling your toughest product and engineering challenges. Inside the episode… A logistics company's urgent copper-measurement problem with no clear owner The hidden cost and inefficiency of manually measuring more than 5,000 pallets How a single office hours conversation reframed the problem as a vision-AI opportunity Training a custom vision model using pallet photos and simple index cards Rapid prototyping with automation and vision tooling to ship in days Over $150K in cost savings and a dramatically better experience for warehouse teams Why involving frontline workers accelerated adoption and improved feedback loops Letting go of perfection and embracing statistically "good enough" outcomes What this teaches us about speed, trust, and momentum through small wins Where this approach goes next and why similar teams should be paying attention Mentioned in this episode n8n (automation platform) Roboflow (vision model training) ChatGPT (image and text analysis) OpenAI API Subscribe to the Convergence podcast wherever you listen, and catch video episodes on YouTube at youtube.com/@convergencefmpodcast. If this was useful, leave a five-star review and like the show on YouTube. That's how we grow. Note: Visuals in the video form of this episode were generated by AI (Gemini) as the originals are sensitive and confidential to our customer and their staff.
