AI isn’t all about automating core business functions at Fortune 500 companies. Small and medium-sized businesses can also use AI to optimize, economize, and in some cases compete more effectively against much larger rivals.
An Austin, Texas-based vegan cheese-maker called Rebel Cheese used it to level the playing field against a larger supplier. Specifically, the company developed a small system of AI tools to help it claw back overcharges from a major shipping carrier.
The company is perhaps best known for winning a $750,000 investment from Mark Cuban, money it used to grow Rebel Cheese into what it says is now a $20 million business. Cuban recently spoke about the company’s crafty use of AI on stage at the Convergence AI event in Dallas.
The Problem
Rebel Cheese ships tens of thousands of orders of perishable, handcrafted vegan cheese across the country. The holiday season is by far its busiest period. “Q4 is all hands, heads down, get it out the door, make sure customers are happy,” the company’s cofounder, Kirsten Maitland, wrote in a recent blog post. “There’s no time to stop and analyze anything.”
After this past holiday season, Maitland took a look at the company’s bank account, and something seemed off. Rebel Cheese had just had its best holiday season ever, yet the numbers didn’t reflect it. So she started digging to find out where the profits were leaking away. She discovered that the company had paid $250,000 more for shipping than planned.
Hiring new employees to research and fix the problem wasn’t in the cards. So Maitland turned to Anthropic’s Claude. “I handed it a year of invoices and a contract,” she tells Fast Company in an email exchange, “and it found patterns I would have needed a forensic accountant to surface, which would have been time-consuming and expensive.”
She says the carrier’s shipping invoices run hundreds of pages per week, with fees layered inside fees. “Most shippers don’t have the time or tools to audit them,” Maitland says. For the carrier, the complexity was not a bug but a feature, and a profitable one.
