WPA Magazine - The Operating Manual for Your Pallet Business October2026

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July 2025

Follow Kat Vasquez on LinkedIn

September 2026

Hey Industry Trailblazers! Last month, we saw AI vision grade pallets more consistently than tired eyes can. This month, we step into the front office, because October is planning season, and most 2027 plans get built from memory and whichever spreadsheet is open.

Start by zooming out. KPMG surveyed 2,131 senior leaders worldwide and found the AI advantage is shifting from being first to running it well. Among companies already seeing returns, 86 percent run a formal management layer for AI, against 31 percent of those still experimenting. That layer is mostly unglamorous: who owns it, what it can touch, what it costs. Most built a gate before a switchboard: data access and security controls led their list at 43 percent, while deciding which AI handles which job came last at 23 percent. As one KPMG leader put it, the answer is rarely the model. Those companies dwarf ours, but the lesson travels.

Many of you are first to try the new tool, and that is a strength. Pair it with the leaders' habit of laying groundwork first, and that

groundwork starts with one question: where does your data live?

Now zoom in on your shop. Quotes sit in email. Invoices sit in QuickBooks. Pricing sits in spreadsheets on three laptops. If you're lucky, customers live in a CRM and orders in an ERP. The rest lives in your foreman's head. AI can only use what it can reach, and Gartner predicted that through 2026 organizations would abandon 60 percent of AI projects unsupported by AI-ready data. In April, we said AI is only as smart as the data you give it. If you haven't tackled this yet, it's your first 2027 project, ahead of any tool.

AI-ready doesn't mean expensive. It means one shared place, consistent names for customers, dates, and grades, and one person accountable for it. To a computer, "Acme Pallets," "ACME," and "Acme Inc." are three customers. Clean it once, and every question you ask in 2027 gets cheaper.

Then comes the payoff. A judgment model answers three kinds of questions: pick the best category, score something on a scale you describe in plain words, or say yes or no. In one early test, a model ranked 100 emails by importance in under half a second for about a tenth of a cent and matched the person's own ratings. Ask it about every invoice and quote, not a sample. Was it a multi-location customer? Was the grade disputed? Count the answers, and your plan rests on your own history instead of a hunch. It works best when answers can be written in advance and a wrong answer is cheap to catch. It returns a score with no reasoning attached, so keep hiring, money, and security calls human. The tool finds the pattern. You supply the meaning.

Only then come agents. An agent doesn't just answer; it acts, like chasing an invoice at 30 days or drafting a reorder quote. KPMG found significant employee adoption of agents climbed from 25 to 34 percent this year, and sits at 48 percent among companies seeing returns. But an agent on messy data makes mistakes at machine speed. Start with one narrow job, a named owner, and a human check. The order is data, then decisions, then agents.

Here's your plan of action, built to move you from working in the business to working on it. Every Friday for the next few weeks, block thirty minutes and treat it like a customer appointment. Week one, list every place your business data lives, who maintains it, and whether it exports. Week two, pick the pile that drives money, usually invoices and quotes, and clean it into one sheet. Week three, write five yes-or-no questions, label fifty items yourself, then have your AI model partner, software provider or a tech partner run them and compare results. Week four, name a data owner, set a 2027 budget line for cleanup, pick one agent task for next spring, and schedule a quarterly re-run.

The best 2027 moves come from strength, not necessity, and strength starts with facts you can find. If you want help mapping where your data lives, reach out, and I'll point you toward options.

Until next time, keep zooming out, keep building from your own data, and keep bridging the gap!

WPA Magazine - The Operating Manual for Your Pallet Business October2026 | Page 19