Transcript for "Event Recap: Inside ProShip Pinnacle 2026":
Hey, everyone. I'm Katie Schroedel from ProShip's product marketing team. Thanks for being here. So a couple weeks ago, we did something we've never done before. We threw our own user conference, ProShip Pinnacle. Two days in Milwaukee just for ProShip customers. No shared stage with five other vendors or sister companies. No generic keynote about the future of supply chain. Just us, our customers, and a lot of very real conversations about shipping. And every customer with an active SMA got a free event pass, so the only cost was getting there. If you weren't able to make it, first of all, we missed you. Second of all, that's why I'm here. I'm gonna walk you through what you missed, what people couldn't stop talking about, the product stuff you actually need to know, and why you're gonna wanna block your calendar for next year. So let's do it. Pinnacle ran March at the Brookfield Conference Center just outside Milwaukee, and honestly, the vibe was set before a single session even started. Sunday night was the welcome reception. It was drinks, snacks, no slides, and no agenda. Just people who spend their days obsessing all the ship shipping, finally getting to talk to other people who obsess over shipping. Everyone picked up their swag bags, which were very legit. It was not your typical branded swag. No branded pens. We're talking fun socks, a mini UPS truck, and a bunch of other goodies from our sponsors. People were swapping carrier war stories and debating right shopping logic over appetizers. This was my kind of crowd. Monday morning opened with a welcome address on the state of ProShip from leadership and then went straight into our keynote, Justin Hazardly. He is a fighter pilot, best selling author, and the kind of speaker who makes you sit up a little bit straighter. His talk was called own the outcome. It was about making clear decisions when everything around you is getting more complex and more pressured. His big thing was stop organizing teams around tasks and start organizing around outcomes. Push decision making to the right level. Eliminate the hesitation that comes from unclear ownership. It's a fighter pilot's framework, but it map maps perfectly to running a shipping operation at scale. It sets the tone for everything that happened at the event after. From there, Monday and Tuesday were packed with product sessions, and these definitely weren't just marketing presentations. These were led by engineers and by technology leaders who helped actually build ProShip. We talked about the 2026 road map, ADS Studio, CVB Studio, Reporting Studio, Observability, Webhooks, and AI. These are things you probably heard about in our quarterly webinars. We also had learning sessions from some of our sponsors. We heard from Reveal, UPS, OpenSky Group, IS Corp plus lunch and learns sponsored by USPS and FedEx. I'll give you the product highlights in a few minutes, but the short version is people were asking hard questions and they were getting straight answers, which is kind of the whole point. Monday night. This is the one that everyone is still posting about and talking about. We took over the Harley Davidson Museum for dinner, museum tours, a DJ, a photo booth, and this is real, a magician. It was one of those nights. We are talking shipping next to a 1952 Panhead while a magician works the room. This happens only at Pinnacle. We also handed out our first ever Pinnacle Awards that night. And I wanna give a shout out to this year's winners. Rue Gill Group took home the innovator award for creative, high impact use of ProShip. SanMar won the featured feedback award for consistently helping shape our product. US Auto Force earned the marketing champion award. Saddle Creek got the early adopter award for being first in line to pilot new features, and INPLS won partner excellence. Spencer's took home the Operations Impact Award, and UPS received the Carrier Excellence Award. Congrats to all of them. It was a really cool moment to have them there. Throughout the conference, we had a live screen printing station where people got custom t shirts made on the spot, plus raffle prizes from our sponsors. We had the Nintendo Switch, a mini Theragun, some f one swag, and more. So, yes, people went home with things. Tuesday brought two things that you definitely can't get from a webinar. First, we had our very popular ask a partnership engineer. This was appointment only, sit down time with the people who actually write the code. No account managers, no middlemen. It was just you and the engineer talking through your actual setup. People really love this. And we did a DC tour at Ruby's. They're a major Halloween costume and accessories manufacturer. This is where attendees got to see ProShip running live in a real warehouse. Nothing drives a product conversation like watching it work in the wild. So we wrap the sessions with the executive fireside chat titled, and I'm not making this up, talk shift to our face. ProShip leadership was on stage with no slides, just taking whatever questions the room threw at them. It was unfiltered, it was honest, and it spurred some great conversations at the event. So beyond the sessions, what were people actually buzzing about? Well, three things kept coming up, in the sessions, in the hallways, and probably in the hotel bar at midnight. So here's what landed. Number one, the sheer complexity of parcel right now. During the roguance session, ProShip leadership laid out the numbers. And even for a room full of people who live this every day, it hit different seeing it all together. In 2010, there are about five viable US parcel carriers. Today, over a 130 regionals plus the nationals. The parcel volume has more than doubled. Surcharges per carrier have gone from maybe eight to over 40, and that's before you layer in peak demand tiers, key rig triggers, and whatever new fees someone invented last Tuesday. But nobody was doom and gloom about it. It framed the whole conference. Complex complexity isn't going back. The tools and thinking just have to get sharper. Number two, self-service. The phrase that kept showing up was more configuration and less customization. Customers are done waiting on code code changes to just adjust shipping logic. They wanna tweak carrier rules, update cutoff times, and see how decisions are being made without filing a ticket and waiting weeks. Every new product ProShip showed was built around that idea, browser based, no code, and built on the engine that you already have running. Number three, AI, but not the kind of AI conversation that makes you wanna leave a room. ProShip cofounder Justin Kramer and engineering lead Rich Udell did something smart. Instead of talking about what AI could do someday, they showed what it's doing right now for ProShip. ProShip has connected AI across six core internal systems. So when you submit a support ticket, AI has already searched documentation and internal knowledge base before your agent even opens up. When their monitoring dashboard catches something off, AI doesn't just send an alert. It checks recent deployments, cross references runbooks, and logs a fully detailed incident ticket before a human even gets paged. That line that stuck with me was, you don't need to do anything differently. This all happens on ProShip's side. It's faster support, safer releases, and better answers. That's the kind of AI story that people actually wanna hear. Alright. Now let's jump back in and get you caught up on the product announcements. So I'm gonna keep these tight because you don't need me to reteach you each of these fifty minute sessions. You need to know what exists and why it matters. Your Sam can give you all the details, and he can take he can take it from there. First up, we're gonna talk about ADS Studio. ADS, which is advanced date shopping, is first intention for finding the best carrier and service for every shipment using nine real world data points. Cost, transit time, cutoff windows, carrier contracts, all of it. ADS Studio is the new browser based interface that lets your logistics team configure and fine tune all of that without touching code. You can see exactly how every shipping decision was made, and you can even change the rules yourself. No IT ticket retired required. Excuse me. This product is available now. The next product we're gonna talk about is CVV Studio. CVV is carrier volume balancing. It keeps your shipping patterns aligned to your carrier volume agreements automatically and in real time. Before this, managing these commitments usually meant someone panic opening a spreadsheet in the last week of the quarter. We've all been there. CVV studio automates it at the point of shipping. It tracks your thresholds, adjust your carry mix as you ship, protects your and protects your discount tiers so you're not leaving money on the table. This is also available now. Next, there is reporting studio. This is ProShip's built in BI tool. It has interactive dashboards, drag and drop charts, and no code queries or SQL if you're into that. This is all powered by your existing ProShip data. No extra license, no separate platform. If you've ever wanted to pull a shipment by carrier breakdown without bothering your analyst or waiting three days for a report, this is your new favorite thing. This is coming soon. And last, observability and webhooks. ProShip is rolling out a phased observability framework. Infrastructure and service health monitoring are already live. Software behavior monitoring is coming in the second half of the year. You'll see updates on that in our quarterly webinars. On the webhook side, ProShip now supports real time carrier tracking pushed to your system the instant a package is scanned. No more pulling for updates on an hourly cycle and just hoping for the best. Your system knows what's happening when it's happening. So that was a lot of product information and not a lot of time. Here's what I tell you. Don't try to absorb all of that from our quick twenty minute webinar. That's not the point. The point is now that you know what's out there. Your next step is to reach out to your strategic account manager. They know your setup. They know what's available, and they will help you figure out what's worth exploring for your instance. So Pinnacle twenty twenty seven, that's the last thing. It's happening, and I'm just gonna make a really quick pitch. What we heard from attendees this year wasn't great slides, nice venue, even though the Harley Davidson Museum did not hurt. What people said was, I got direct access to the engineers who build ProShip. I had real honest conversations with other customers who deal with the same problems that I do, and I left with specific things that I'm actually going to do. That combination is hard to replicate over Zoom. It's hard to replicate at a mega conference where you're one of 10,000 badges. Pinnacle is small enough to be personal, and it's deep enough to be useful. So we will share dates and details as soon as they're locked. And just like this year, every customer with an active SMA will get one free event pass, so you're really just covering travel. All I'm saying is start planning now. So I just wanna give a quick thank you to all of our Pinnacle twenty twenty six sponsors. We have platinum sponsors, Reveal, IS Corp, OpenSky Group, plus FedEx, and UPS. All of our gold, silver, and fun level sponsors, this event doesn't happen with all of them. One last thing, please follow-up with your Sam about Pinnacle. We wanna know the best time of the year for this event and if the content is what you're actually looking for. Your answer answers will directly shape how we plan 2027, so please just take a second and share that. With that, have a good one, everyone, and we will see you at Pinnacle twenty twenty seven.