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Pallet C e nt ral • May -Ju ne 2 0 26 3 3 B efore Nick Pericle took the stage at our Annual Leadership Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, we caught up with him backstage—slides ready and iPhone with Claude loaded in hand—to talk about something that's on every pallet executive's mind: artificial intelligence. As the founder of Tenexity and an expert in industrial AI, Pericle has spent considerable time inside various industrial facilities, watching companies wrestle with a technology that promises everything and, too often, delivers frustration. His take? It doesn't have to be that way. Threading The Needle: Attention vs. Achievability For pallet companies eager to experiment with AI, choosing the right project is half the battle. Pericle sees the same pattern repeatedly: companies swing too big or aim too small, and either way, nothing worthwhile gets off the ground. "Any AI project has to be big enough to get an executive's attention but small enough that it can actually be accomplished given the limitations a business currently has," he explains. "If it doesn't thread those two needles, it doesn't get liftoff." e pressure executives feel around P&L makes them hungry for tangible results, but that same focus can cause them to underestimate what implementation actually requires. "Most things that would be big enough to reduce costs or drive revenue aren't actually achievable given the limitations companies have with data, with their processes, and with change management," says Pericle. It's a tension that helps explain why headlines routinely declare that 95% of AI projects fail. His advice: start smaller than you think you need to. Intelligent Automation As A Starting Point Many pallet companies still process significant volumes of manual data entry, purchase orders, emails, and shipping documents. Unglamorous work, but exactly the kind of task where AI can shine. "Documents that require a human to do some form of data entry are ripe for automation," Pericle says. "No matter how complex or nuanced you think it is, AI is knocking that type of stuff out of the park." Done right, this kind of implementation can reach 99.9% accuracy, is manageable enough for most teams to execute, and tends to generate the executive buy-in needed to pursue bigger initiatives down the road. Pericle calls it AI through IA, or artificial intelligence through intelligent automation. But the opportunity doesn't stop at data entry. Unstructured data—the kind buried in emails, contracts, and customer communications—represents a largely untapped source of business intelligence for most pallet companies. "ere are P&L impacts living within contracts that companies just don't know they can be taking advantage of because they don't have the time to go read and internalize everything," Pericle says. "AI gives them that ability."

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