177 - Designing Effective Commercial AI Data Products for the Cold Chain with the CEO of Paxafe

Experiencing Data w/ Brian T. O’Neill (AI & data product management leadership—powered by UX design)

In this episode, I talk with Ilya Preston, co-founder and CEO of PAXAFE, a logistics orchestration and decision intelligence platform for temperature-controlled supply chains (aka “cold chain”). Ilya explains how PAXAFE helps companies shipping sensitive products, like pharmaceuticals, vaccines, food, and produce, by delivering end-to-end visibility and actionable insights powered by analytics and AI that reduce product loss, improve efficiency, and support smarter real-time decisions.

Ilya shares the challenges of building a configurable system that works for transportation, planning, and quality teams across industries. We also discuss their product development philosophy, team structure, and use of AI for document processing, diagnostics, and workflow automation.

Highlights/ Skip to:

• Intro to Paxafe (2:13)  
• How PAXAFE brings tons of cold chain data together in one user experience (2:33)
• Innovation in cold chain analytics is up, but so is cold chain product loss. (4:42)
• The product challenge of getting sufficient telemetry data at the right level of specificity to derive useful analytical insights (7:14)
• Why and how PAXAFE pivoted away from providing IoT hardware to collect telemetry (10:23)
• How PAXAFE supports complex customer workflows, cold chain logistics, and complex supply chains (13:57)
• Who the end users of PAXAFE are, and how the product team designs for these users (20:00)
• Pharma loses around $40 billion a year relying on ‘Bob’s intuition’ in the warehouse. How Paxafe balances institutional user knowledge with the cold hard facts of analytics (42:43)
• Lessons learned when Ilya’s team fell in love with its own product and didn’t listen to the market (23:57)

Quotes from Today’s Episode

"Our initial vision for what PAXAFE would become was 99.9% spot on. The only thing we misjudged was market readiness—we built a product that was a few years ahead of its time."
–IIya

"As an industry, pharma is losing $40 billion worth of product every year because decisions are still based on warehouse intuition about what works and what doesn’t. In production, the problem is even more extreme, with roughly $800 billion lost annually due to temperature issues and excursions."
-IIya

"With our own design, our initial hypothesis and vision for what Pacaf could be really shaped where we are today. Early on, we had a strong perspective on what our customers needed—and along the way, we fell in love with our own product and design.."
-IIya

"We spent months perfecting risk scores… only to hear from customers, ‘I don’t care about a 71 versus a 62—just tell me what to do.’ That single insight changed everything."
-IIya

"If you’re not talking to customers or building a product that supports those conversations, you’re literally wasting time. In the zero-to-product-market-fit phase, nothing else matters, you need to focus entirely on understanding your customers and iterating your product around their needs..”
-IIya

"Don’t build anything on day one, probably not on day two, three, or four either. Go out and talk to customers. Focus not on what they think they need, but on their real pain points. Understand their existing workflows and the constraints they face while trying to solve those problems."
-IIya

Links

• PAXAFE: https://www.paxafe.com/
• LinkedIn for Ilya Preston: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilyapreston/
• LinkedIn for company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/paxafe/