AI in the Supply Chain: Cold Chain Technologies’ Ranjeet Banerjee

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:02)
AI is pretty hot these days, but how often do we think of AI keeping things cool? Find out today as we talk with Ranjeet Banerjee, CEO of Cold Chain Technologies.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:14)
Welcome to Me, Myself and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence in business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Information Systems at Boston College. I'm also the guest editor for the AI and Business Strategy Big Idea Program at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:35)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG, and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. And together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching AI for five years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities across the organization and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:03)
Today we're talking with Ranjeet Banerjee, currently the CEO of Cold Chain Technologies.
Ranjeet, great to talk with you again. Welcome.

**Ranjeet Banerjee** (1:10)
Thanks, Sam, and thanks, Shervin.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:12)
Hi, good to see you.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:14)
Our podcast is Me, Myself, and AI, and we're particularly interested in individual stories about people working with artificial intelligence.
And I said welcome again because I think we got to know Ranjeet from his work at Becton Dickinson, and Shervin's known him long before that, I think. Ranjeet helped us with our research a couple of years ago and we did a webinar together. But Ranjeet, you got a new role now. Can you tell us about your work with Cold Chain Technologies?

**Ranjeet Banerjee** (1:36)
So I joined Cold Chain Technologies in August of 2020, and it's been a very exciting journey. What excited me about the company and what it does and the entire industry space it's in is the potential to really transform and address a key need as it comes to the life science industry. And that is the need for, really, the simplest way I can say this is, how do you provide assurance when you are transporting drugs, biologics, vaccines over long distances, over complicated routes? How are you providing assurance that the product that is getting transported is meeting all the right conditions and ensuring safety and efficacy? That's the challenge statement that got me excited about Cold Chain Technologies, which is what this company does. So CCT or Cold Chain Technologies is the leader in thermal assurance packaging for life sciences.
At the time when I was taking on the role, COVID was starting to become an important topic, a pandemic. And since then, we've also played a huge role in supporting the distribution of COVID vaccines.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:56)
That seems important to me, and I'm sure my own personal health has benefited from that. But what does artificial intelligence have to do with transporting cold stuff?

**Ranjeet Banerjee** (3:05)
If you think of where we want to go is go from providing visibility today, which is available to providing assurance that the drug, the vaccine, or the biologic, when it moves from point A to point B, and point B being the last mile, being the recipient, the patient, how do we assure that the product has reached in the right conditions? And that's where AI and other technologies come into play. So think of it this way. Today, we can monitor where the product is, where the drug is, what conditions it's seeing. But we want to know more.
What we want to know is, when will it reach the patient?
And when it reaches the patient, what's the probability that it will be safe and effective?
Or is there a chance that there will be an excursion? So imagine now there is a drug being transported. It's stuck at an airport, right? A lot of drugs are aphrated, right? So it's stuck at the airport. Now we want to know, OK, there's a delay. Is that a meaningful delay? And if so, what actions we need to take? When you start translating this from simple visibility to providing assurance, that's where AI comes in.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (4:28)
This probability is an interesting take on packaging and logistics. So if I understand correctly, one of the applications of how you're using AI is to figure out what's the likelihood that that item that's being transported is going to get to the recipient, not just in time and in place, but also intact or in usable form.
Is that right?

**Ranjeet Banerjee** (4:54)
Correct.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (4:56)
And then let's say the probability is low, then what would you do?

**Ranjeet Banerjee** (4:59)
There would be an intervention. Exactly. Let me explain where we are right now. So we have launched our first path platform, which I'm calling visibility. It tells you exactly where a vaccine is, what conditions it sees, or it could be also a drug or a biologic, a cell and gene therapy product. Where is the product and what conditions it's seeing right now? So that's what we have today, what we are working on. And that's going to be coming in pretty soon.