WiseTech's new CEO on recovering from scandal | That's Business with Alan Kohler

I really balk at the sentiment that cutting a third of your workforce isn&#39;t a response to a cratering of investment capability as shown in share price, and blaming AI advancement is just following silicon valley mania where, perversely, companies are being rewarded for their lay-offs. I&#39;d be very interested to see that data on helpdesk call throughput, cause I&#39;d bet my dollars that throughput is up, while caller satisfaction is far down, which I think is important in this context as it provides ammunition to competitors to provide better service. <br>Was a great interview, even if he was a little too well media trained to break down the idiosyncrasies of the business.

Appoo&#39;s two headline claims sit awkwardly together: he tells the market that roughly 90% of CargoWise code is now written or assisted by AI with a 45% lift in engineering productivity, then argues the company&#39;s moat is the integration layer built up over two decades across 400 airlines, 150 shipping lines and customs authorities in 193 countries, but that surface was defensible precisely because it was slow and expensive to build, and he has just reported that the cost of building it has collapsed. If that holds for the incumbent, it holds for a challenger. The same tension shows up when he dismisses the in-house systems run by the other top-tier forwarders on the grounds that maintenance is getting harder given the rate of change across the sector, since connector maintenance, schema drift, spec changes, and regression fixing is exactly the workload current models handle best. Underneath both is a dated threat model: his framing throughout is a chat window being asked to replicate CargoWise, which nobody serious proposes, rather than an orchestration layer assembled above the regulatory data sources, protocol standardisation turning bespoke connector work into a commodity, or agents transacting directly between forwarder and carrier. The durable moat is the accreditation and liability layer, being a licensed filing agent in each jurisdiction, holding the bilateral agreements, and bearing the consequences of a wrong filing, which is institutional rather than technical and genuinely hard to displace. He picked the wrong one to defend.

Damon Burgess at the Victorian Government had history at WISE Employment.

I can&#39;t wait to sell my WTC position.<br><br>They went from a seemingly well-governed company (minimal hiring during COVID, good reinvestment in the business) to a Silicon Valley also-ran (laying off staff, chasing AI stock bumps, massive CEO remuneration)<br><br>That&#39;s without mentioning all of the disastrous behaviour from Dicky White, office raids etc.<br><br>Truly a case in bad governance harming a good product.

Not as good as the ray-gun level interview about the super-sized El Nino in the previous video, but still a great conversation.

What’s the word…. Dodgy. <br>They should be transparent and honest, their actions will have a very long negative effects on Australian software market. ABC should expose and seek truth that’s what tax payers money be used for.

no data sovereignty risk with USA models sigh

Terrific stuff Alan thanks again ! And thank you ABC ! ❤

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