Using Analytics for Storm Tracking with Michael Wohlfarth

Hey everyone, we're back here continuing our coverage of Alteryx Inspire 2026 in Orlando. My next guest is actually a customer. So we're going to hear from a real live customer how they're using Alteryx and some of the new functionality that is being built into it.

His name is Mike Wohlfarth. Did we get that right? Got that right.

Perfect. Okay. And Mike, I'm blanking on the company name right now.

Opportune. Opportune. And I'll be honest, I hadn't heard of Opportune before today, and I'm sure many of our audience has not either.

So why don't we start there, Mike- Sure ... an idea of who Opportune is and what you guys do. Of course.

So we're an energy advisory firm, so we deal with clients, big-name energy clients. We have multiple service lines. I particularly work in our process and technology, so that houses anything from system implementations to analytics, and that's the group that I work with.

But we also do restructuring, complex financial reporting, so there's a bunch of different service lines that we service for our clients. I love it. And it's interesting between climate change and environmental kind of regulations or deregulations, as the case may be.

There's a lot going on. But people, I always say this, the worst atmosphere to do business in is an atmosphere of uncertainty. Of course.

Right? Good or bad, if I know this is what it is, at least I can plan around it. When you get things that are uncertain, and I need contingencies and contingencies to contingencies to contingencies, things get complicated.

And that's kind of your business in a little bit of a nutshell, huh? It is. I can tell you what, I've been in energy most of my career, and nothing's certain in energy.

As much as you think you know, you don't know. You think something can happen tomorrow, it's not going to happen. It could happen completely different.

So it's definitely one of those roles that keeps you on your toes, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. I just did a little bit of Googling and AI-ing before we sat down.

One of the things you guys are involved in is around hurricane tracking and weather and that. If you wouldn't mind, give us a little background on that. Of course.

So this use case actually started from a previous client I was at, and it was a very manual process that they were doing. So this client had an individual who was their weatherman, call it, where he would go and print maps of hurricane tracks. And that mattered to them because they had business in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi.

So you think about all hurricanes hitting the southeastern part of the country. " Then that would trigger dispatchers and supply managers routing fuel to those locations. And turns out, the hurricane can move a different direction or completely change course.

And they'd be stuck holding the bag per se, because there's a lot of wasted money, a lot of wasted resources. So it really got me thinking of how to leverage a tool like Alteryx to be able to kind of get ahead of the game there. So that's what we did.

We built out a workflow or workflows that actually tracks the storm using some weather APIs. And then it even goes as far as tracking changes in that storm. So every 15 minutes it runs.

If the storm were to change the track, it would be accounted for, and it knows which direction it's going to go. So all those stores in that location, or all the district locations or fuel locations, whatever you want to call it, in that path could potentially get more inventory. So there's many things that go into it.

There's inventory, there's demand, there's customer usage. It even knows where specific drivers are. Yeah.

So if you think about the transportation industry, not a lot of people know this, but a tractor-trailer driver, anybody carrying fuel, or any of your Amazon products, whatever the case, they can only drive so many hours per day due to DOT rules. Rules, yep. Especially with hazmats, if you have hazardous material like fuel, obviously.

So it takes into account where the driver is. Really? Wow.

Takes into account the closest supply point. It even routes the truck to the nearest location. So all that work was being done manually.

Good job. Well, I give kudos to who was doing it before, but there's just so much room for error, so much wasted money left on the table, where a tool like Alteryx, every 15 minutes, there's an update. It pushes it out to everybody via dashboard.

It even sends alerts if the storm were to pop up in the Gulf. Like I say, in 15 minutes, a storm were to pop up, tropical storm, it's going to alert everybody that needs to know within a couple of minutes. Crazy.

As someone who's lived down here in South Florida for the last 23, 24 years, I lived that firsthand. We sit there and pray over whether we're in the cone or not, the cone of the storm. And then all of a sudden, you're this far out of the cone, and you feel like you're safe.

But 15 minutes later, you're back in the cone. Of course. And it's like, well, what the heck?

Don't they know what they're doing? It's all Greek to me at some level, right? Just tell me, do I got to leave my house or not?

It's amazing that you-- Because I can only imagine what it was like before Alteryx pulling this together. First of all, it's a little bit like reading tea leaves or something, right? It's more art than science.

Secondly, just pulling all that data together had to be crazy. So no wonder why there was a lot of mistakes. You couldn't even really pull it as quick as you needed to, right?

No. So there's multiple systems where you're getting your inventories, you're getting your demand, you're getting customer information. By the time you pull that information, it's stale, right?

So you got to do it all over again. So using a tool like Alteryx would allow us to- How long have you been doing this with Alteryx? So I've been an Alteryx user since 2018.

Seems like a lot longer, but yeah, so 2018. And really over the past four or five years since I've been at Opportune, pretty much our whole PNT group uses it. Gotten really, really interested in out-of-the-box type solutions, right?

So you got your normal, I'm going to use Alteryx to just transfer some data, but solutions like this, it's not only fun, but it solves a real use case. Yeah, no, it wasn't fun before- It was not fun. It was not fun at all ...

but it makes it fun now. That's what it sounds like to me. I want to talk a little bit about AI, right?

And that seems to be the theme, not just here at this conference, but around everything. Sure. It's got to be a big help.

It's a huge help. I will tell you candidly that prior to AI, there's definitely flaws for everything, right? Yeah.

So there's algorithms, we've got formulas that, again, you can't capture everything. If a storm just shifts a little bit to the east or the west, it could potentially cause some errors. But with AI, that's really tightened up since we've leveraged AI in the workflow itself.

It just helps you make decisions that any human or even just Alteryx alone can't make. Mm-hmm. Historical data's been a huge part of it, too.

Huge historical storm information. Sure. There's just so much information you can feed into it just to make it smarter and smarter.

I guess my question to you on that is one of trust. How much do you trust it? I trust it with my life, I'll tell you that.

Well, you're trusting all your clients with it too, right? Of course. I really trust it.

I know one thing that, and I say this, and it's going to come out bad, I don't mean it to come out like this, but I always get excited for hurricane season, just because we get to, hey, we're going to roll this thing out again for the year and get to see, compare what it's telling us versus actual versus projected results. So that's a big part of it as well, just checking, make sure everything's in line. But we're consistently making updates to it.

Yeah. Not only from the storm tracking side, but you have the routing of the truck side, you have the supply optimization side. So there's really three parts to it, and each one makes the other stronger.

So a big part, again, is the move from, let's say, generative AI, right? Just kind of chatbot and generative AI, to agentic AI, where it moves it for you. So before, I would imagine you're running projections, you're running data into the AI, and it's telling you things you should do as a result.

Correct. This year, it'll actually do those things for you. Do it for you.

Correct. Are you there yet? We're not there yet with it.

We're very close. Excited for that. I would imagine.

Over the next two years, I'm just really excited to see where it takes us. And we've had demos where we're showing it to clients around up in Canada, hey, we're worried about forest fires, so we want to see what's going on with the winds. And not only hurricanes, it could be leveraged- Right, yeah ...

for any weather event. Sure. And God knows there's plenty of them.

Plenty of them. We're getting tornadoes where we never had tornadoes before, and at different times than we've had them. And of course, fire, forest fires, and wildfire.

It's funny, the interview before you was with the chief customer officer here at Alteryx, Phil Tabbot Humphrey. He was talking about speaking to customers and getting the feedback, what makes a happy customer, basically. Right?

And I'm interested in your experience. You wouldn't be here talking, I assume, if you weren't going to be a happy customer. But what makes you happy about being an Alteryx customer?

So I've been an Alteryx customer, like I said, since 2018. Mm-hmm. My prior company, we got it.

And when I came to Opportune, that was a must. We have to get Alteryx. One thing I would say about Alteryx that I really like is every year there's new features, new things that you can leverage just to make what you have existing stronger.

And that translates well for us because we have customers, right? So if I'm building out workflows for my customers, if they're happy, I'm happy, right? So it's kind of like a little domino effect with that.

But Alteryx, over the years, has put out some really good features. And AI, I think, is just the next level of-- I'm really excited to see where that goes in probably the next year and the year after that. Absolutely.

I agree with you. I thinkLook, this isn't the only event that I come to. I talk to people all over the world.

We're just scratching the surface- Yeah ... on this stuff. It's going to get more real in the next year, two years, three years.

This isn't some fad that's going to disappear or fade out. It's going to really continue to grow. If I had to ask you to look into your crystal ball, this is going to be game-changing for your business.

It is. Not only with this use case, but anything AI related, right? So again, we're in the energy industry.

Generally speaking, the energy industry you would think is on top of technology. They're a lot behind the eight ball in a lot of cases. So AI is just coming into the energy industry.

We're doing some amazing things with it, so really excited to see where that goes and- I tell people this, Mike. A lot of people say, "Oh, we're kind of late to the game. We didn't start till February on agentics," whatever.

It's still so early. It is. You can't be late at this point.

Two years from now, you're still not all in- Yes. That's, there is no point ... you're really late.

Correct. You might want to just consider doing something else with your life's work. I would say- But it's early now ...

yeah, I would say within the next year, if you're not in it or at least thinking very hard about it, then you're going to- Absolutely ... miss a lot of time. You know what we didn't mention?

People want to maybe get more information about the company. What's the website? Sure.

com. How do you spell that? O-P-P-O-R-T-U-N-E.

com. com. Love it.

Hey, I appreciate you coming on the show. Of course. Thanks for the time.

Appreciate it. It's always good to hear real life, real people who are using solutions from these companies and seeing. And then it's one thing to just use a solution from a vendor, but to see how it affects my life, your life out there, this is real life, right?

Of course. And that's what it's about. Thank you very much.

Thank you. I hope your hurricane stay away from you in Brooklyn. You know what?

We've been lucky. We really haven't had a hurri-- I don't want to say anything. Knock on wood.

Knock on wood. But hurricane season starts next month. We're here.

We've got one more interview today, so check it out. We'll be back in a moment. You're watching Techstrong TV.