Episode #36
The Autonomous Warehouse: Moving Beyond Dashboards to AI Agents with Kendrick Hair, Fishbowl
In this episode of the Data Insights Podcast, Ganesh Gandhieswaran, CEO of ConverSight, sits down with Kendrick Hair, Chief Evangelist at Fishbowl, to talk about where inventory and supply chain teams get stuck today, and how AI agents are starting to close the gap between what the data shows and what actually gets done. Ganesh and Kendrick dive into: • Why growing product-based businesses aren't short on data anymore, they're short on the ability to act on it, from an apparel brand that scaled from 50 to 18,000 SKUs almost overnight to a fast-growing retailer sitting on $20 million in excess inventory and a cash flow problem to match • Real examples of AI agents already at work, including a purchase-order agent that checks supplier lead times and cuts a PO automatically, and a customer-facing use case that responds to quote requests with pricing and delivery dates in real time • Why clean, structured data has to come before agentic automation. As Kendrick puts it, putting AI on top of bad data is like hiring the smartest employee in the world and then mislabeling every filing cabinet in the office • A case study where a joint Fishbowl and ConverSight customer cut back orders by 73% after moving from manual dead-stock reviews to an agent that flags slow-moving inventory and recommends discounts on its own • Kendrick's take on when autonomous agents go mainstream in supply chain, and why he compares the shift to the decades-long path from cruise control to self-driving cars Whether you're weighing your next ERP move, building the case for AI internally, or just trying to figure out if your inventory data is even ready for it, this conversation offers a grounded, practical look at what's working now and what's coming next. Guest: Kendrick Hair, Chief Evangelist, Fishbowl Host: Ganesh Gandhieswaran, CEO, ConverSight
