On July 10, GaBiz featured a conversation with Norfolk Southern Chief Marketing Officer Ed Elkins. In the article, “Trained for Success,” Elkins discusses the critical role of rail to Georgia and the nation’s supply chain, why Norfolk Southern chose Georgia for its corporate headquarters, how the company is enhancing safety measures and its customer-centric, operations-driven business model, and how AI is supporting the digital transformation of rail.

Select excerpts from the conversation follow below. To read the full article, click here.  

What prompted the 2021 move of the headquarters to Atlanta, and what are some of the ways Norfolk Southern contributes to Georgia’s pro-business environment?

The city is a perfect fit for our vision of Norfolk Southern as the digital railroad of the future. It is diverse and inclusive. It is a technology hub with world-class talent and universities. And it’s a crucial transportation corridor steeped in the history of the rail industry. Locating in Atlanta also brings us closer to many of our large customers.

To be a leader in today’s rapidly evolving transportation and logistics market, we needed to be more agile and work more collaboratively across organizational boundaries. We needed to bring operations, technology, marketing, finance, and other functions together in one place. Many operations and technology roles were already located in Atlanta. The city is a cornerstone of Norfolk Southern’s Golden Triangle—the foundation of our intermodal network traffic flow and a vital link in the nation’s freight transportation network.

Artificial intelligence is a topic on everyone’s minds. How is it impacting your industry and how is Norfolk Southern leveraging it for good?

Freight railroads are the safest way to move goods over land. Norfolk Southern knows we can make rail even safer. Frequent, detailed train inspections to identify potential defects are critical to safety and preventing accidents. Norfolk Southern, in collaboration with the Georgia Technology Research Institute (GTRI), is piloting next-generation machine vision inspection technology that can pinpoint small defects challenging to identify with the unassisted human eye. And it can do so while the train is moving at full speed along main lines. The new technology will increase existing safety protocols and provide an even higher level of confidence for the public and our railroaders.