Product Agility

Ayushman De Lang-Talwar: Stitching Systems and Sanity: Generative AI in Logistics and Mindful Product Leadership - Productized 2025 TalkInTen

• Ben Maynard, Barbara Fazeka, Ayushman de Lang-Talwar

Share episode

Send us a text

Live from Productized, Lisbon — a conference we think is exceptional. Productized brings together the sharpest product thinkers in a city built for ideas, and we're honoured to partner with them again for this live series.

In this short Talk in 10 episode, we sit down at Productized to explore how generative AI is changing logistics, what product leaders should automate (and what they should keep), and how mindfulness and Buddhism can shape better product leadership.

Key topics discussed

  • How Productized creates a world-class environment for product leaders and why we’re proud to partner with them
  • Generative AI as a stitching layer across emails, chats and legacy systems in logistics
  • Practical automation vs. AI: when to use each
  • Data accuracy, predictions and risks in freight and shipping
  • Mindfulness, Buddhism and how inner practice helps leaders navigate complexity


Guest bio:

Ayushman de Lang-Talwar is a product leader with deep experience in logistics, having worked inside major shipping operations and in startups. Based in the Netherlands and speaking at Productized, he combines hands-on product transformation with a personal practice in Buddhism, exploring how mindfulness intersects with modern AI-driven work.


Thank you to our sponsors: Bobcats Coding — a Budapest and Lisbon-based digital product studio specialising in AI engineering and end-to-end product development. Download their latest AI economics guidebook for free at bobcatscoding.com.

Subscribe for more Talk in 10 episodes from Productized, and follow up for the longer conversation on mindfulness and AI.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

Stay up-to-date with us on our social media📱!

Ben Maynard

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmaynard-sheev/

🐦 https://x.com/BenWMaynard

💻 https://sheev.co.uk/

Product Agility Podcast

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/productagilitypod/

💻 https://productagilitypod.co.uk/

🖇️ https://linktr.ee/productagility


Listen & Share On Spotify & iTunes


Want to come on the podcast?

Want to be a guest or have a guest request? Let us know here https://bit.ly/49osN80

Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast where we explore the ever changing world of product leadership and org design, helping you navigate complexity and build better outcomes for your people and your customers. This week we're coming to you live from Lisbon for the third year in a row at the Productize conference where I'm grabbing 10 minute conversations with product thinkers, leaders and innovators from around the world. These quick fire chats are all about what's shaping our industry right now, from AI and product strategy to the human side of building great products. Now a huge thank you goes out to Bobcatz Coding for making this Lisbon series possible. Bobcats is a Budapest and Lisbon based digital product studio specializing in AI engineering and end to end digital product development. They're also on a mission to educate the market, exploring a new topic every six months and this fall is no exception. Their latest AI economics guidebook is out now and you can download it for free@bobcatscoding.com now here's your talk in 10. Welcome back everybody. We are still in Lisbon, still at Productise and still doing talks at 10 and still getting funny looks from people who are trying to do their work whilst we're sitting in a public area recording a podcast interview. Hi, you're famous now. We'll get your name later, we'll put you on the show. I am here with my co host Barbara, co founder and CEO of Bobcats. True story. I'm CEO of Bobcats and I'm very excited about this conversation because we are going to hit a topic about generative AI and logistics that I'm very excited about. Do you know what, if there's ever a niche of something to get excited about, that's the definition of it right there. Oh my God. I'm also oddly excited about this. Not that person though who just walked away. Anyway. Ayushman. Ayushman. Ayushman. Ayushman. Yeah, man. Where have you come from for the conference? Netherlands. I live in the Netherlands for eight years now. How's it been for you? Netherlands is. It's great. I lived there for eight years, moved there for industrial design. Now working for one of the shipping companies, Maersk. Lovely weather. I love biking to work. Yeah, can't complain. Nice. Good. We don't like complaints. What are you doing at Productised? I'll be speaking about my newfound passion about Buddhism, which are back to my roots in India and how that helped me become a better product leader. So I'll be talking about mindfulness, how we are surrounded by chaos every single Time and in a lot of good decision making, how staying true to our own, in control of our own emotions. That's the topic I'll be speaking about. Beautiful. I'm really sad. I'm not gonna get this here because it sounds shit hot, but, you know, I think I'm not gonna start this. I'm not gonna ask the first question. Barbara, do you want to ask the first question? I will do. Okay. Somehow we will try to connect Buddhism with AI. Okay. So like Buddhism is all about interconnectedness. Right. Just like AI. And so we were talking a little bit before we started the conversation. And I know that you are in logistics and your new startup is also in logistics. And what I'm super curious about is that back at the time when Generative AI was not saying I was working with logistics companies and AI was there for them for 15 years, but generative AI, how did it change the game for them? Yeah. What are your insights on logistics companies and AI? So I think I joined the organization at a very unique moment where they were purchasing the licenses from Microsoft. So I have experience of how the organization looked before and after that. And one of the key pains in the industry has been it's a traditionally old industry and the pains has been that the transposing, the physical environment of where the movement of goods is into a digital environment has relied majorly on EDIs and APIs. This may be a bit too technical, but essentially every organization is trying to build its own infrastructure and dashboards and portals so that the other stakeholders that they're working with can interact with them and communicate with them. So it's really relying on building the infrastructure layer at the back, which would help people connect and do these handshakes between data because they need to run smooth operations. And that relies on having accurate data at the right time, because a 247 operation, so people are on shifts. So if I leave on a shift right now working for a logistics company, whoever is filling me up for the, for the next shift needs to be aware of what happened in the last 12 hours. I think what generative AI is helping with is instead of us transforming our organization into a new platform, which has been the challenge ever since, we can kind of stitch our current mediums that we use to interact. So emails, phone conversations, conversational chat, and I don't need to switch to a new system anymore. The ground staff, the staff which is operating the trucks and managing the loads, they're able to just continue using that. And we can stitch that now very easily. And this was not possible before. Nice. I'm going to segue that. You want to ask another question, don't you, Barbara? Well, we can. How about we do a bit about the talk, we'll segue into that and then we can ask another question or we just do a really much longer episode. I think my timekeeping is just very relaxed right now. So your experience is then where you are, I suppose that's then giving you the stories that you're going to use in your talk, is that right? Or have you come to your talk through a different avenue? No, I think there's been parallels to me working in a startup to going to a corporate. And there's a lot of change management in how a corporate sees transformation with technology and the energy that a startup would have in bringing the transformation. I think the idea for joining Maersk was like seeing in traditionally old industry from the inside and seeing where could you have potential disruptions. And it's part of that, but the other part is about the talk is also about in the age of AI, which parts do you hire an AI agent to do versus which parts do you do, keeping your mental sanity in check? So there is, there's definitely an interlink between becoming a product leader as an entrepreneur or in a bigger organization to how AI is transforming your job as well. If I was to come to you in the office and be like, I just don't understand how I'm supposed to determine what I do versus what an agent does. How do you answer that question? I think still that within the organization, if you ask different people, they'll give you different answers. I think the biggest one has been around doing the grunt work, which is consolidating tons of information from our Slack channels to emails to customer conversations to Salesforce Tickets. Nobody has time anymore, I feel to bring that together in one dashboard and present it to the senior organization to pass this project forward. At least we are not anymore excavating for data. We have enough clay on the table that we need to just shape it. And the product manager's role now is to shape that clay into a form factor that is the right for that environment. What's the balance between the use of AI and automation, have you found? I haven't personally seen AI automation. Well, as in. So there are. So for example, what I'm finding is that there's huge amounts of energy wasted in manual tasks and that you don't need AI to actually automate what people are doing. AI can be something you can add when there's value in understanding the language and kind of bringing it all together into something readable. But there's a huge amount of benefit in just automating stuff. So for example, you know, if you building a dashboard, if the effort is that you've got all these disparate systems and vendors are charging you all this money to just pull it out and put it somewhere, actually putting it and putting in somewhere. Just an automation understanding that and turning into something human readable and easily understandable. That's more maybe where AI comes in. But are you finding that you're doing lots of automation or is it now. You say that one of the biggest use cases of that is transcriptions. Yes. Meeting transcriptions, customer interviews. We use quite some tools in that space where we're bringing Together Insights which 2024, October, we were doing it manually on a Word document. Somebody like you paid people to type out what people were saying. That would be mad. Imagine like an old typing pool explaining. That to my kids in future. That's going to be a challenge. Yeah. My question would be, is like how so what's your experience? How logistics industry can handle data accuracy questions? So like AI at the end of the day is like statistical model in the background and like we will never get to a deterministic answer for any question and always there will be like 0.06% of cases when it's giving a false answer or hallucinating. How can this industry handle this risk? I think the oldest use case of AI has been in predictions, what you're referring to. So it's predicting when my container from point A to point B is going to arrive, when can the truck pick it up so the operations can anticipate in advance the client can have the goods on time. I think there's still so much unpredictability at the sea, with the storm, with the wars, with the different macroeconomic situations happening, that I don't think AI can predict that. But AI can automate some of the workflows that we would have, I think. Yeah. So sadly we're at time and it's going to start getting busy. I can see people appearing, I can see Andre, the founder of the conference, loitering, which must mean that the action's finished and he can escape. So we should begin to wrap this one up. But what I would just like to ask is if people have heard how you started this talking about Buddhism. And I think it's a topic which I'd love to maybe do another episode on, if we can grab you before we go. And just to really understand, like, more about that angle. If people want to learn more about Buddhism, as an example, where. How would you recommend that they start? Where should they start? Yeah. I'm reading about it from it's education. It's not a cult, first of all. So it's education means you can find it in books. I have a Zen meditation center in Netherlands. I go there and I follow the learnings. It's quite out there. It's been quite an old study. So start with the most easy accessible book that you could find. YouTube, the most accessible channel. Yeah, I actually follow a lot of people on YouTube who it's. Yeah, just start small, I guess, and see if it's for you or not. Awesome. Awesome. I'll tell you why I asked that question after the episode. Thank you very much for coming on and I wish you all the best. When is your masterclass? It's on Friday. Friday, 4. Friday at 4. Just before we close. So I'm gonna have everybody. Well, you know why they put. They know why they put the good people at the end so that people hang around. That's a compliment. I'm really looking forward to it. Yeah, it'll be fantastic. Thank you very much. Coming on, Barbie, you've been amazing as always, and we will be back again very soon with another talking 10 from productized 25.



Head Shot

Ben Maynard

Host