SF Tech Week Recap: Robots, Founders, and 17 Open Tabs

My Feet Are Filing a Complaint

SF Tech Week recap: my feet are filing a complaint. The rest of me had a great time.

I went in with one question: how close is AI, and the robots running on it, to doing real operational work? Not demos, real work. Here is the week, stop by stop.

What Took Weeks Took an Afternoon

The workshop stop deserves more than one line, because it is the clearest example of the week’s theme. A lead engine is four pieces that normally live in four places:

• A customer profile — who ZoreeTMS is for, written down precisely enough that a machine can use it.
• Prospects — companies that match the profile, found from public signals and each given a fit score.
• A tracker — one place where every prospect, score and next step lives.
• Outreach drafts — a first message for each prospect, ready for a person to review and send.

None of those steps is new. What’s new is that AI connects them, so the output of one becomes the input of the next without a person copying and pasting in between. A person still decides who to contact and what to say. The busywork in the middle is gone.

Robots Are Dressing for the Occasion. Freight Is Still Checking the Portal.

Robots are moving pallets, picking orders, and dressing for the occasion.

What Chasing Updates Actually Looks Like

If you have worked a transportation desk, you know those tabs. A carrier portal to check where a load is. An inbox full of tender responses. A rate spreadsheet. The TMS itself. A customer email asking for an ETA. A phone call to confirm what the portal already should have said.

Every one of those tabs is a handoff where a person moves information from one system to another. The robots I saw this week don’t work that way. They get their instructions from a system, do the work, and report back to a system. Freight should run the same way.

Less Chasing Updates, More Moving Freight

That’s where I’m building ZoreeTMS: less chasing updates, more actually moving freight. In practice, that means:

• Carrier tender accepts and declines come in by API and update the shipment and its orders on their own.
• Warehouse ship-confirm and proof-of-delivery events move the status forward without anyone typing it.
• Every open screen refreshes live, so the whole team sees the same picture.
• The built-in AI assistant can build orders from emails and carry out actions, with a person approving each one.
• Your team can rate, plan, tender and check status from Microsoft Teams, without opening another system.

If we met this week, say hi. If we didn’t, I was probably trying to network with something that needed a charging dock.