AI may be faced with calculating ROI. Brands, agencies, and technology vendors alike are beginning to face more difficult questions about whether generative AI can deliver the meaningful business outcomes it promises. But the honeymoon phase isn’t over yet.
DUDE Wipes has implemented AI tools throughout the company.are doing Reduce effort in supply chain tasks — Provide regular AI training and cloud accounts to your employees, and modernize the way your company hires to reduce dependence on agencies.
Digiday recently spoke with Ryan Megan, co-founder and CMO of DUDE Wipes, to understand the company’s AI strategy and discover efficiencies and next steps.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
How are you using Claude to build your internal team?
This allows us to be a little more intentional about who we hire and where we hire them.
For years, we operated in a state where we relied too much on our marketing teams, overstretched our headcount and departments, and were long overdue to really strengthen them. So we’re actually unloading and hiring quite a few new seats just because those things are long overdue.
How does Dude Wipes balance AI automation and human oversight?
It depends on what sector you are talking about. For finance, logistics, and operations, you can save real man-hours. Our operations department created Diesel Dan and a tool called Diesel Dan that taught optimizations (specific skew palletization and truckload configurations) that saved us time and money, saving us 10 to 15 man-hours per week. Previously, specific SKUs ordered by specific retailers had to be entered manually. They taught the AI a problem and told it what kind of solution they were looking for. This saves 10 to 15 man hours, optimizes pallet size and truck load, and saves money in addition to time.
The tools you can use to further strengthen your finance, operations, and logistics teams from just a man-hour perspective are different than the tools you have on the creative side of things.
What about the creative process?
This helps free up brain space when you have a lot to do. You can give Claude and other tools general ideas, encourage Claude to creative ways you’re trying to think about things, and spit out more inspirational stuff.
We’re definitely thinking about that. We are working on optimizing it as much as possible, but it is not our top priority at this time.
