AI Governance, Ethics, and the Stewardship Framework: A Conversation with Evan Schwartz, Chief Innovation Officer at AMCS Group

**Ray Rike** (0:08)
Welcome to the AI to ROI Podcast. On today's episode, I am joined by Evan Schwartz, the Chief Innovation Officer at AMCS Group. I'll be covering three primary topics with Evan today. First, AI adoption optimization, the importance of governance, ethics and stewardship. Second, two external agentic AI use cases around dispatch management and customer service.
And third, an internal AI to ROI case study at AMCS Group around reducing churn. So with that, Evan, could you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the AI to ROI Podcast?

**Evan Schwartz** (0:51)
Sure. Thanks, Ray. Early on in my, I guess, illustrious career, I fell bass-ackwards into software and development and computers and found that those were very, very easy for me to get into. And I started my career doing games and that lasted for a little while until I fell into what I consider the resource-intensive industries or the wealth industries. The first one was in natural gas.
I had an opportunity to build their full-on ERP system. It was a little company called Infinite Energy. Their slogan was, Got Gas. We played around with that for a while. And that went really, really well to see a gamer's mindset into the usability side of business software. It was fairly new. We hadn't talked about UX. And that kind of led to the value journey all the way through natural gas into pulp and paper, efficiencies around back office, billing systems, ERP, which led into the secondary fiber, OCC, DLK, and recycle waste got into scrap metal and all kinds of other industries and the ancillary side intercies that they feed, chemical industries, everything. So that sort of just led me on a lifelong career of building software systems that directly interface into people, into the human component of business, trying to find ways to make business more efficient and profitable. And that's kind of led me here on the AI journey.
As we've kind of looked over the last year and a half, I would say there's been a lot of tripping, a lot of hype, a lot of discussion about AI, but not a lot of understanding of how to get there, a lot of focus on the technology. So hopefully today you and I can clear up on, while the tech is find interesting to focus on, the real answer is to come back to people, governance, ethics to get to where, if you want to get anything that's valuable out of AI today.

**Ray Rike** (2:50)
Okay, Evan, let's start just with a brief, 30-second overview of AMCS Group, what you do because then we're going to get into your first foray into launching AI as part of that solution. So tell us a little bit about the company first.

**Evan Schwartz** (3:06)
Yeah. So the short answer is AMCS Services, Resource Intensive Industries. So anywhere where you're having to collect in bulk any type of material or you're providing services in bulk, where you're going out and providing those services, we manage the logistics, all the back office, the customer relationships, the management, the history, the billing, anything to deal with fleets. If you've got vehicles or fleets doing services or performing services or collections, we manage all the fleet maintenance, the logistics, the pickup, the materials, the valuation all the way out to the sale of those materials, including the accounting.

**Ray Rike** (3:41)
You do this in multiple countries around the world, right?

**Evan Schwartz** (3:44)
80 countries around the world, AMCS has their systems driving these efficiencies everywhere. Performance sustainability is a big deal to us.

**Ray Rike** (3:53)
Well, one of the reasons you're here on the AI to ROI podcast is because as Chief Innovation Officer, you have responsibility for making sure you have AI integrated into your solution, into your platform.
And I think there was some testing on messaging about how does this impact your customers? And you started with employee replacement. Tell me a little bit about the feedback you guys received on that.

**Evan Schwartz** (4:20)
Yeah, so there's been a lot of push and there's a lot of private equity, a lot of investors in the companies of the customers that we serve. And if you look at AI and look at the efficiencies, the obvious first choice is I can do a lot more with a lot less. So what is the natural number one cost for a business? It's human resources, it's people. So I understand the propensity to drive towards headcount reduction. And that was the first year and a half of headcount reduction until you get AI out of the lab and into the real world, and then you start finding out it doesn't behave the way it did in the lab. The control conditions did not produce the output you were looking for.