Overview
Global logistics solutions provider GXO worked with Proactive Global to find a rare talent that combined both high level academic qualifications in machine learning and AI, along with practical knowledge of logistics and warehousing. The company is looking to technological innovation as a way to improve efficiency.
The challenge
GXO needed a Senior Director of Warehouse AI, reporting into the Chief Automation Officer: someone who could take machine learning out of the research environment and apply it to the physical realities of a live distribution centre, including safety, inventory accuracy and shipping throughput.
The specification called for a Masters or PhD in computer science or machine learning, combined with genuine operational experience inside a warehouse. Those two populations barely overlap. Our own assessment put the number of people in the United States who can credibly do this job at around 30 individuals.
The role had been open for more than eight months before Proactive Global was briefed. It had not produced a viable shortlist, something to be expected from a candidate pool that small.
The search
Cian Denvir, VP of Proactive Global North America, spent the first two weeks scoping rather than sourcing. Standard competitor mapping was never going to surface a population this rare, so the search was built around the academic route instead: identifying institutions with strong AI and machine learning programmes that also carried a deep engineering and supply chain heritage. Georgia Tech was one of several.
That work produced a mapped, addressable pool of seventy people nationwide. Rather than sample it, Cian contacted all seventy. Screening was deliberately unforgiving. The disqualifying question was not academic credibility, it was whether the candidate had spent real time inside a warehouse and understood how one actually runs. More than sixty of the seventy were ruled out on that basis or on availability. Four candidates were submitted to GXO. One was hired.
The results
The appointed candidate has now been in seat for two years and is building a team underneath her, which is the clearest evidence available that her appointment was the right one. GXO has deployed AI across its infrastructure, providing a clear ROI from AI, which is being passed on to its customer base.