Evan Smith

speaker

503 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Evan Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Decoder with Nilay Patel · Tariffs didn’t bring manufacturing jobs back to the US · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

Charging for outcomes and charging for units of work where there's some alignment around the value of work is where we're going.

And in customs brokerage, to kind of bring it back to the acquisition we're announcing today, in customs brokerage,

you have an existing pricing model where these logistics providers are charging the businesses whose goods they move on a per customs declaration basis.

So, you know, it's anywhere from $20 in the very low end to 200, $250 in the high end for more complex customs entries.

And you do that, you know, day after day after day, shipment after shipment after shipment, and it kind of runs the cash register.

And with agentic AI being able to do most of that work now, it puts you in some really interesting places as Altona to experiment with pricing, but also as a global logistics provider.

Does it make sense to have a $200 per entry pricing model or can you

Can we kind of shift the value creation left and say, hey, you know, we, Global Freight Forwarder, are going to help you manage your supply chain network to be more compliant, to be more resilient.

We're going to help orchestrate your supply chain.

And we're going to stop billing you transactionally to clear goods across the border.

Yeah, there is.

I think in the world of just LLMs predicting the next token, you're right.

In a world of agents that follow SOPs, I think you're wrong.

And what I mean, and I'll narrow it specifically to where I know what I'm talking about, which is this trade and customers and supply chain world.

So the Servo platform, and now as part of Altana, you can go...

as a logistics provider, you can say, I'm gonna create standard operating procedures for every one of my customers and their data pathologies.

So I'm bringing in, you know, I've got PDFs with these data fields in them with these like weird numerical formats.

I've got, you know, Chinese script coming in alongside English script, and here's how to handle these weird edge cases that would break earlier systems.

And you can feed the machine a document to distill rules like standard operating procedures to handle that just like a human would follow those rules.

They also have the user experience where as the broker interacts with the customs entries and with the data coming from the supply chain on a customer by customer basis, they have a workflow where as the user modifies something here or there,

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