As AI scrutiny grows, DUDE Wipes points to supply chain savings and productivity gains

DUDE Wipes has AI tools across the company, reducing man hours in supply chain tasks — providing employees with regular AI trainings and Claude accounts and revamping how the company hires to be less dependent on agencies.

Digiday recently caught up with Ryan Meegan, co-founder and CMO at DUDE Wipes, to understand the company’s AI strategy, found efficiencies and next steps.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

How are you using Claude to help build your internal team?

It’s allowed us to be a little bit more intentional about who we hire and where we’re hiring. 

We’ve operated, for many, many years of being so, so lean on the marketing team and really over extending our people and our department that we’re long overdue for really beefing up. So we’re really unloading and hiring quite a few new seats just because we’re long overdue on those things. 

How do you balance AI automation with human oversight at Dude Wipes?

It depends on what department you’re talking about. For finance, logistics, and operations, those can save actual man hours. Our ops department created a tool called Diesel Dan and Diesel Dan saved anywhere from 10 to 15 man hours a week because of what they’ve taught it to optimize — certain skew palletization, and truckload configurations — which has saved time and money. It used to be certain SKUs ordered by a certain retailer put them in a position that needed to be manually input. They were taught AI the problem and prompted it to what solution they were looking for. It’s saving them 10 to 15 man hours, optimizing pallet sizes and truckloads to be saving us money on top of the time and saving them. 

From just man hours standpoint, the tools you can use it to build on more those finance, ops, logistics teams is different than on the creative side of things.

What about for the creative process?

It can help you free up some brain space when you have a lot on your plate, you can feed Claude, or whatever tool, your general ideas and prompt it to the creative way you’re trying to think about things, and then have it spit back at you things that give you further inspiration.

Are you optimizing your product data to ensure AI tools and major shopping platforms like Google and Amazon can easily find your products?

We’re definitely thinking about it. We’re working to optimize as much as we can, but it’s not a massive priority at this juncture.