MHI Solutions Improving Supply Chain Performance
How BoxTalk.ai helps 3PLs find the profit hiding in their own data
BY SANDY SMITH
FOR MOST THIRD party logistics providers, data is both the lifeblood of the business and its biggest source of frustration. Any number of systems can generate volumes of information but too often that information isn’t compiled into one overall picture.
That gap—between the data 3PLs have and the action items they need—is what BoxTalk.ai set out to solve.
Cofounders Kyle Ivins and Rob Glance come to the challenge from complementary angles: Ivins with a product and datasystems background, and Glance with more than two decades of hands‑on 3PL leadership. With BoxTalk, they’ve built a platform designed to give information owners a real‑time, reconciled view of their business.
While its initial phase is aimed at 3PLs, BoxTalk expects to expand with tools for shippers and brands, including carrier‑invoice reconciliation and 3PL invoice auditing in late 2026.
A SIMPLE START
Ivins says the idea for BoxTalk emerged from a simple observation: “Every 3PL is, without knowing it, a data company. They don’t get into it for that reason, but there’s so much information streaming in from carriers and all their different systems.”
The problem is that the data rarely matches until billing forces it to. “Teams were spending multiple people almost the entire week just to get bills out,” Ivins says. “We knew that was a problem that needed solving.”
As BoxTalk began interviewing 3PL leaders, one theme kept resurfacing: billing was the central bottleneck that prevented them from understanding their own profitability based on customer or product type. “The only time the data gets reconciled and put into one place is when the bills are put together,” Ivins says. “And there was no real FinTech leader in the space doing the entire cycle from data ingestion all the way through automating accounts receivable and collections.”
AFTER THE HARD WORK IS DONE
While BoxTalk is often described as an AI‑driven platform, Ivins is quick to clarify where AI fits.
“AI plays a very small role in the actual billing,” he says. “Billing has to be about data rigor, data engineering.” Once the data is reconciled and “penny perfect,” AI becomes a powerful layer on top of the system.
With clean data, BoxTalk’s AI can answer operational questions, spot anomalies, simulate pricing scenarios and help 3PLs build rate cards for new customers. “Once you set up billing and you’re good there—which is really the hard part—then you can start to ask our system any question about the business and it knows the right answer,” Ivins says.
Some operators try to build their own insight agents using widely available AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude. Ivins says the limitations become clear quickly.
“You would not want to trust Claude to be doing the level of data analysis that you need,” he says. Exceptions, changing carrier formats and evolving WMS processes all break DIY systems. “Software atrophies. You build something once and it works, and then a couple weeks later it suddenly doesn’t.”
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