Hi everybody. Welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, your host and reporter, the

automotive news. And I'm Alexa St. John, covering tech and suppliers for

automotive news. Our guest today is Catherine Schifferley, CEO of Work Truck Solutions, a platform where buyers and

sellers of commercial vehicles can come together and find and sell the specific vehicles they need, which is a harder test than you might think.

First, Alexa, what's going on in the supplier world?

What sort of things are you seeing in the supply chain as everyone kind of grapples with the ongoing

COVID-19 crisis?

Well, Pete, we're seeing a lot of the same this week and over the last couple of days.

You know, we have seen both automakers and suppliers continue to tap their credit lines, securing cash in order to protect themselves from, you know, virtually what will be an unknown number of weeks ahead in this crisis.

So lots of uncertainties still as we navigate this.

One thing I think is interesting though is

a source that I spoke with at IBM last week told me about how this crisis, you know, as

tragic as unfortunate as devastating that it has been will bring a little bit of as This will be a big opportunity for artificial intelligence for automation for new technologies to be implemented into the supply chain and the reason for that is

Had all of these technologies been put in place already or at least been put in place more

so than they are, we would have seen less of a struggle in the early stages of this pandemic.

Just when it was initially affecting Asia,

we would have seen less struggles

to reroute supply chains or retool elsewhere

or redesign the supply chain in a way

that would have kept production going at that time.

So I think it will be interesting to see how suppliers bring on AI and more automation to their processes

so that they're able to weather, know downturns and crises like this in the future.

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