At the recent Woodpack Global conference, an AI consultant delivered a wake-up call and a practical roadmap to the audience. Nick Pericle of Tenexity identified how artificial intelligence can help every employee get more done and multiply their impact.
By the time Pericle stepped off the stage, many in attendance were reaching for their phones to download AI tools that they were likely skeptical of just 45 minutes earlier.
As founder of Tenexity, a firm that guides industrial companies through what he calls “the Intelligence Age,” he has made a career out of turning AI skeptics into AI practitioners. And his message for the pallet industry is blunt: the tools are ready, the price is right, and every week you wait is a week your competitors might not.
Forget the Hype — Focus on the Do
Pericle opened by acknowledging that many in the room had already flirted with AI and had been underwhelmed. He referenced the Gartner Hype Cycle, the well-known pattern where new technologies are oversold, underdelivered, and then quietly mature into genuine game-changers. Sound familiar? It should. The internet, smartphones, and cloud computing all went through the same awkward adolescence.
His core challenge to this way of thinking is that most business people are using AI wrong. AI is helping them create things, such as drafting text, generating summaries, and coming up with sales material. But Pericle suggested that the real power, and the thing that separates the winners, is what he calls the “do.”
“AI can now go click on buttons, transact on your behalf, do things like humans do,” Pericle said. “It’s the ‘do’ that drives businesses forward, and most people haven’t experienced that yet.”
For pallet companies, that means automating quoting, order entry, accounts receivable follow-up, inventory analysis, competitive research, and even building custom internal applications without a single line of code or an IT department.
Two Tips that Will Change Everything Immediately
Before getting into specifics, Pericle offered two foundational pieces of advice that he said will dramatically improve anyone’s results with AI tools.
First: turn on “thinking mode.” Every major AI tool has a setting called “thinking” or “reasoning” that causes the model to work through problems more carefully before answering. It’s not always on by default because it costs the software companies more to run. But Pericle was emphatic: “If you turn on thinking mode, I don’t remember the last time it got something seriously wrong.”
Second: stop typing and start talking. “Every single time I’ve worked with somebody who got poor output from an AI tool, it came back to the same thing — they didn’t give it enough information,” Pericle said. The solution? Use the microphone button and just talk. Describe your company, your region, your customers, your problem. The AI handles punctuation, filler words, and context. It’s not like barking commands at Siri. You’re having a conversation with something that genuinely understands what you are saying.
“You’re going to be on your phone talking to it, and your spouse is going to walk in and say, ‘Are you talking to your AI friend again?’ And you’re going to say yes,” Pericle said, laughing. “Because it’s so much faster.”
The AI system that Pericle uses the most is Claude (www.claude.ai), developed by Anthropic. The reasons are simple; Claude is really good at actually doing things, not just generating text. He said, Claude is “the best at doing enterprise work far and beyond anything else” because “when you ask it a question, it uses tools, such as writing Excel, doing PowerPoints, writing code.”
Sales & Marketing: Prospecting at the Speed of a PhD
During his live demonstration, Pericle spoke a rambling, natural-language prompt into Claude. He described a pallet manufacturer based in Idaho Falls, with a warehouse in Salt Lake City and eyes on Phoenix, looking to expand sales to 3PLs and distribution centers. He asked the AI to research the market, understand how 3PLs evaluate new vendors, produce an executive briefing and generate sales collateral for his team. The room watched it happen in real time.
He also demonstrated the “deep research” function. This is a feature available in Claude and ChatGPT that dispatches the AI to scour hundreds of sources across the web, then synthesize everything into a concise briefing. As a practical example, Pericle asked it to analyze how current tariff policies and shifting trade routes were affecting pallet demand in South Florida and to project two years out.
“Think of it as hiring a PhD-level researcher for 40 hours,” he said. “Except it costs $20 a month, it doesn’t take lunch breaks, and it doesn’t complain about the commute.”
Operations & Quoting: Images, Schematics and Warehouse Plans
One of the more eye-opening demonstrations involved AI vision. This is the ability to analyze photographs and engineering drawings. Pericle uploaded a customer’s warehouse floor plan schematic into Claude and asked it to identify pallet demand, which it did effectively in minutes.
The AI read the legend, identified bulk rack pallet locations, analyzed functional zones, and produced a detailed equipment and materials breakdown. All of this was done in mere minutes. Pericle then told it his company sold pallets specifically, and asked it to update the analysis through that lens, flagging the ongoing cycling requirements rather than treating pallets as a one-time capital purchase.
“The same thing works for inventory counting, for reading delivery receipts, for processing photos from the yard,” Pericle noted. “Your team takes pictures every day. Those pictures now contain data you can actually use.”
Automating Administration & Finance Functions
Pericle demonstrated how Claude can automate processes that many pallet companies do by hand or mange on spreadsheets. He asked Claude to build a full P&L model for a hypothetical $50 million pallet manufacturer, complete with an investment thesis section to model the financial impact of capital decisions. Then, separately, he fed it an inventory data file and asked for analysis to improve inventory management.
The message for pallet company owners: if you’re spending hours every week building reports, chasing AR, or updating spreadsheets by hand, you’re doing work a $25-per-month subscription could handle. Pericle recommends using AI to follow up on outstanding receivables, review inbound emails on a schedule and process expense reports automatically.
Building Custom Tools, No IT Department Required
Perhaps the boldest part of Pericle’s presentation was a live demonstration of Replit (www.replit.com), a tool that lets anyone build a custom software application simply by describing what they need. No coding knowledge required. No IT staff, just a clear description of the problem. In about ten minutes, he built a working pallet configurator — a 3D interactive tool where users could enter dimensions and see load calculations in real time. He followed that with a custom voice-activated customer service intake application that parsed a spoken complaint into structured fields: customer name, equipment type, model number, issue description, warranty status.
“Your quoting process. Your order entry. Your returns. All of these internal processes where humans are interpreting information and keying it somewhere else, those are the targets,” Pericle said. “The cost to build something like this is a couple hundred dollars a month. That’s it.”
Getting Your Team On Board — And Keeping Them There
When asked how to actually move a team from skepticism to adoption, Pericle’s answer was direct: buy the tool and make people use it.
His specific recommendation: sign up for Claude’s business tier at $25–$30 per person per month, then block out two hours for mandatory hands-on training. Not a PowerPoint presentation. Not a demonstration. Every person at the keyboard, doing real tasks from their actual job.
“Then, every week in your leadership meeting, celebrate the people who are trying — not necessarily succeeding, but trying,” he said. “That’s how you change culture. It takes three to six months, but that’s how it happens.”
He also pressed every organization to establish an internal AI policy, not a restrictive set of prohibitions, but a clear statement of which tools are approved, what data can go in, and who employees can talk to with questions. “Uncertainty kills innovation,” he suggested. “Remove the uncertainty.”
On data privacy — the most common objection — his advice was equally direct: pay for the business tier, read the terms of service, and stop worrying. Every AI tool he works with has been reviewed by IT teams at industrial companies, and the conclusion is consistently the same: it’s at least as safe as your CRM, your ERP, or your email. If you’re not paying for the tool, your data is the product. If you are paying, you’re protected.
Five Conversations Every Pallet Company Should Have Right Now
Pericle closed with five questions he encourages every industrial organization to address internally:
- What are we doing manually that AI could do for us?
- Where are we losing time to repetitive knowledge work?
- Is our data integrated across systems, or siloed in ways that limit what AI can access?
- Do our employees know what they’re allowed to use AI for?
- Are we having honest conversations with customers about how we might use AI together to strengthen the relationship?
“The distance between the ideas you have and actually making them happen is shorter than it has ever been,” he said as he wrapped up. “That’s not marketing talk.”
The pallet industry has always prided itself on pragmatism. By that standard, the time to move on AI is now. All you have to do is download some tools and start talking about the problems you want to solve.
Editor’s Note: Nick Pericle can be reached at nick@tenexity.ai.
Recommended Tools
Claude is a next-generation AI assistant and family of large language models developed by Anthropic. It is designed to be safe, accurate and secure. Claude acts as a collaborative partner for writing, coding, analyzing documents and creating. It has the capabilities of interpreting uploaded images, analyzing complex data, and operating via a web interface or command-line coding tool.
Replit is a cloud-based, AI-powered development platform that allows users to write, build, test and deploy applications directly in a web browser. It features an AI agent that generates apps from natural language prompts. This makes it user friendly for beginners and coding novices.
