Intelligent Audit's Brian Pollack: From PhD in Particle Physics to Supply Chain: Pros to Know Award

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Hello, my name is Marina Mayer, Editor-in-Chief of Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive, and I am here with Brian Pollack, Chief Product Officer for Intelligent Audit.

Brian is a recipient of this year's Pros to Know Award in the Rising Stars category. Brian, congratulations. Thank you so much for joining me today. Let's talk about you. Tell us a little bit about yourself, and your journey, and how you got to this current stage in your career.

Brian Pollack: I was in academia for a while. I got my PhD in particle physics at Northwestern. I went on to do some post-docking after that. I worked at Fermilab at CERN in Geneva, mostly on particle accelerators. And then I switched gears for a bit, and was a lab manager and part of a team at UPMC in Pittsburgh where the focus was on bioinformatics, and that was much heavier on machine learning techniques at the time, computer vision, that kind of stuff.

I started out consulting with Intelligent Audit shortly after that. And then started as their sole data scientist, where I built out some POCs for some products. Eventually grew that data science department to where it is today, and then eventually became head of all product.

We're focusing on adding this data science layer, and these AI additions, and modernizing a lot of the pieces that we're putting together right now to better serve our customers.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: One of the things outlined in your submission is how you oversee the integration of AI into every facet of the business. From where you sit, why is AI so important to the future of the supply chain space, and what do you tell those AI naysayers who don't necessarily believe it's important?

Brian Pollack: I think AI is kind of unavoidable right now. It's important in basically every field, so I don't think logistics and supply is any different. It's so important because it allows us to do so much more rapid prototyping and creation, creating software that would have taken days, weeks can be done in minutes or hours right now. That allows us, especially in supply chain, to really focus on the harder problems now.

We have a great team of experts, domain experts, subject matter experts that understand the data, they understand the edge cases, they can leverage these AI tooling, both to help them work and also integrate it into the work itself, so that we can get a lot of the easy stuff done and help us focus on those harder problems.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: And you explained earlier, you're a PhD-trained experimental particle physicist, and you worked at advanced research institutions. How does this training apply to the supply chain and logistics space?

Brian Pollack: My academic training was experimental particle physics, very data-heavy, so that was big data, back when that term was really booming.

And the data coming out of CERN, the Large Hadron Collider, that kind of stuff, it's a massive trove of data that you have to sift through and find the important pieces that you need to rise to the surface. That kind of training and that kind of experience has a very direct correlation with the kind of work that we're doing at Intelligent Audit and in supply chain in general. We're sifting through an enormous amount of data, all the transactional data, the shipment data, all the invoice and billing information, all the various rules and pieces that are put together. We need to find the pieces that don't fit a lot of the time. That's a lot of our mission. Of course, there's more to it than that, but it's really important to find the pieces that don't fit, and to do that accurately and quickly without surfacing a bunch of false positives. We can't inundate our customers with a bunch of detections for things that don't actually happen, and so that fine balance is really influenced by that kind of academic work.

On the other, on the other side as well, the team that I've built up and the team that I work with, they take proving and validating the products that they're working on very seriously. We don't want to release something that we think works, but haven't proven to ourselves that truly does work. And a lot of the academic rigor there is actually used to really verify, like, yes, this is producing the metrics that we need, the output that we need, and we're proving it to ourselves. Then it's so easy to prove to the customer that this is producing that ROI as well.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Looking ahead, you plan to lead several major product initiatives, including a new capability designed to strengthen data accuracy, reliability, and trust across the platform, as well as an AI-powered chatbot. What can you tell us about these new initiatives?

Brian Pollack: As far as improving our data accuracy, our reliability, those platform improvements, we have a couple different products out, some of which are giving our UI an overhaul, making it easier to navigate through our system, aligning some of the services that we've been adding more naturally into our ecosystem.

There's a lot of data that comes into our system, and there's a lot of customizations that customers need. And, so handling that customization in a well-regulated, straightforward process to make sure that they get the output they need while we can still run the same services under the hood, the same audit. We can check the same rules and regulations and provide the same additional services, like anomaly detection, or something like forecasting, and additional services like that. All of that has to work smoothly out of the box.

Linking all that together is part of the major initiatives that we're rolling out, building more toward easier to self-serve, easier to understand and easier to onboard new customers and new requests like this.

On the second piece, the chatbot.

Chatbot is just basically a placeholder name right now. What we really want, and what we're actively working toward and have iterated through a couple POCs already internally is an AI-assisted tool for navigation and for explanation. As opposed to kind of a standard chatbot, you ask it a question, it'll give you an answer. We want this to also assist with navigation and data aggregation and display for the customer. We want, at the end of the day, a customer or an end user to be able to ask in natural language, show me my spend for a certain carrier across a certain time period, and just have it happen, right? We want to reduce that friction, reduce that barrier to entry, and that's what this tool is allowing us to do.

So much like our first initiative of improving our accuracy, our reliability, our platform in general, the chatbot links in and takes advantage of all of those improvements to produce a much more streamlined user experience.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: The Rising Stars category recognizes young or newer professionals whose achievements, hard work, and vision have shaped the supply chain network. What advice do you have for other young professionals in the supply chain space?

Brian Pollack: The advice that I would give is probably the same kind of advice for any kind of young professional.

It's to make sure that you're producing high quality, easy to validate work at the end of the day, focusing on that final output, and not on all of the individual steps, show what it takes to build these products out. That was certainly a learning experience for myself, coming, again, from a very academic background where everyone is very interested in poring over the methods, the individual pieces that you have to use to put this together. You know, at the end of the day, you need to prove output, right? You need to prove that the product that you put together works. And so how it works is less important than making sure that you're really laser-focused on proving that it does work and that it is providing that kind of value. And once you do that, building up your career, building up your team, making sure that everyone's focused on that kind of output and that kind of mission becomes much easier.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: What is something we haven't discussed yet that would be important for our viewers and our readers to know, a good takeaway or something that's pretty cool to share?

Brian Pollack: I would say one of the biggest takeaways is the explosion of AI and how that is, here to stay is so important across basically every major software company, of course, other verticals as well.

But understanding how to use it effectively. There's a combination of trying to stay on top of the fire hose of information that comes out, all of the new developments, being able to sift through, the hype and actually target down on the things that really are impactful and important, snd then being able to apply them to your team. So being flexible enough to actually ingest these. And to work with them while not being so caught up in the hype that you're whipsawing to and fro, trying to figure out how to make heads or tails of all this news.

I think at Intelligent Audit, we're doing a great job of striking that balance. We're applying these tools in a rapid form. We're able to prototype much quicker now. And at the same time, we're keeping a lot of our core foundation intact, making sure that our domain experts, the people we work with, that the trove of information that we've built up over our company's history is still driving the output that we need to drive, and these tools are enhancing this and speeding us up, but, it's an interplay, it's not just a drop-in replacement.