I spent a Saturday morning with PGDBM students at SIES School of Business Studies, as part of their TechX Business Series. Finance, operations and marketing specialisations, all in one room. My opening line: none of you came to B-school to move trucks.
Fair enough. But every company you will join either moves something or pays for something being moved. That is the job.
WHY THIS ROOM
I have spent 20-plus years in logistics software, with 100+ enterprise customers across India, South-East Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The honest observation: the business has changed less than you would expect. A consignment still leaves a godown in Bhiwandi, still waits somewhere, still needs a signed proof of delivery (POD) before anyone can bill for it. More things change, more they remain the same.
What has changed is how much of that waiting can now be seen, measured and, increasingly, handled by software.
FINANCE
To the finance students, I showed one chain: POD stuck, bill not raised, money not collected, month-end not closed.
Stuck PODs are stuck money. Add GST reconciliation, TDS booking, vendor payments and ageing, and a surprising share of a finance team's month goes into matching two lists that should have matched on day one. You may sneer, "that is an accounting problem, not an AI problem." It is both. The matching is exactly the work software should do first, so your people spend their time on exceptions and judgement.
OPERATIONS
For the operations students: a plan on Monday morning meets a different reality by Monday afternoon. A truck breaks down, a driver does not turn up, a customer reschedules. The question is how quickly someone sees it and what they do next.
We went through live demos of WebXpress tools and AI products here, because slides do not convince anyone in this field. Seeing a delayed trip surface on its own, with the next action suggested, does.
MARKETING
This was the stream that looked most puzzled. What has marketing to do with logistics?
Everything the customer remembers about you is delivery. Promised date, actual date, did anyone call before the customer had to. A brand that runs on a missed promise is just an advertisement. Marketing people who understand delivery data will write better promises than the ones who do not.
NOT SCARY
I told them plainly: AI is not coming for your first job. It is coming for the boring 40% of it. The student who understands the process underneath, and can tell the software what to do and when it is wrong, becomes the manager. The one who only knows the tool does not.
I also told them what we have not solved. At WebXpress we are still working through platform readiness, clean data and customer adoption, and I would rather say that to students than sell them a miracle. Patience is the real differentiator.
WHAT I WANT THEM TO TAKE AWAY
Pick one stream, learn how a consignment actually moves, and ask the dull question in every meeting: where does this wait, and who is paying for the waiting?
Logistics will not wait for you to be ready. Trucks never do.