2025
Chris Bradley said Veritiv ran its first test of agentic order entry in roughly late November or early December 2025.
“we did kind of our first test of that back in probably late November, early December of 2025”
Topic
Chris Bradley
16 facts from 1 episode, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
Undated
Chris Bradley is Chief Marketing Officer and Head of AI Transformation at Veritiv.
“Today's guest is Chris Bradley, Chief Marketing Officer and Head of AI Transformation at Veritiv.”
Undated
Chris Bradley said Veritiv manually keys 1.7 million orders a year through its order entry process.
“order entry within our company, where we manually key 1.7 million orders a year”
Undated
Chris Bradley said large language models are non-deterministic, so an agent can sometimes do something unexpected.
“Because, you know, L L Ms are non-deterministic, it can do something unexpected sometimes.”
Undated
Chris Bradley said Veritiv has no screen recordings of human work on computers, but it does have them for its AI agents.
“we don't have screen recordings of every time a human does anything on a computer, but we do with agents”
Undated
Chris Bradley said each call an agent makes to a large language model is a fresh model turn that must re-read the context, skills and guardrails.
“If it takes twenty different agent call or like large language calls per session, you're actually getting a fresh model every time.”
Undated
Chris Bradley said Veritiv's order agent worked well at low volume but showed anomalies once it handled thousands of orders.
“because it was operating really well at low volume. But once we got to, like, over thousands of orders, then all of a sudden you start to see these anomalies.”
Undated
Chris Bradley described decision leverage as one of two primary types of AI leverage, where AI helps with better analysis.
“there's two primary types of leverage that you can get with A I. So you can get decision leverage, where it's really helping you do better analysis.”
Undated
Chris Bradley said Veritiv deliberately chose labor leverage, automating repetitive manual work, over decision leverage.
“We deliberately picked the latter, and it's it's tempting to pick the the other one first.”
Undated
Chris Bradley obtained from Veritiv's chief HR officer a list of jobs across the company's roughly 8,000 employees to find automation targets.
“I started with our chief H R officer and I got him to give me a list of all of the jobs for like our 8,000 employees.”
Undated
Chris Bradley said Veritiv found job types such as customer service, financial operations and sales where five or six hundred people hold the same role.
“we found, like customer service, financial operations, sales, where you literally could have five, 600 people that all have the same job type.”
Undated
Chris Bradley said change management has been the biggest obstacle in his past transformations, including before AI.
“in all of the big transformations I've done, even prior to A I, the biggest thing that you is always gonna hold you back is gonna be change management.”
Undated
Chris Bradley said Veritiv used agentic tools and computer use models to automate manual processes, which he said was not possible five or six months earlier.
“how do we use agentic tools to take some of those manual processes and really figure out how to use computer use models”
Undated
Chris Bradley said large B2B companies run a patchwork of legacy ERP and homegrown systems, with some Veritiv staff using up to four monitors.
“most of us live in this world with a patchwork of legacy systems, E R P systems, homegrown systems. And you have a large number of users who have two or three or even I see in our company sometimes four monitors.”
Undated
Chris Bradley defined true agentic AI as AI that is given a goal and performs all the steps that only a human could previously do.
“True agentic A I has to be, here's what needs to get done, and the A I goes and do does all the steps that the human was the only one that could do that previously.”
Undated
Chris Bradley said AI work and AI leadership at most companies usually come from AI, machine learning, analytics and business intelligence functions.
“a lot of A I, and even the leadership in A I, usually comes from the A I, M L, analytics, B I functions at most companies.”
Episodes