As CTO of Packer Fastener, one of Bill Feck’s primary concerns is the inventory management issues of handling 300,000 different products, around 30,000 of which can be active at any one time. AI is now helping with that challenge as well as being used to predict potential customer churn, diginomica reports.

The NetSuite implementation replaced legacy ERP systems and spreadsheets and brings accounting for the company’s different business units together. A notable results was reducing the monthly close cycle from 20 days to five. Meanwhile, NetSuite’s Analytics Warehouse has allowed it to combine ERP, transport management, and payroll onto a single reporting platform.

When it comes to AI, Feck said Packer Fastener wants to empower its people and customers with the latest tools and technology, according to diginomica.

“We’ve been leaning into a lot of machine learning and NetSuite’s Analytic Warehouse,” he stated. “It has some out of the box ML capabilities and AI chatbots that are delivering high level insights really quickly for our users.”

Packer Fastener isn’t getting rid of the human element in its production-ready ML models in the near future, but once it functions well that could change.

“Most, if not all, of the AI functionality we’ve been launching absolutely relies on a human in the loop. Give it a year, and maybe that’s not going to be the scenario.”