Ask HN: How to incorporate machine learning into day job?

I work for a small regional shipping company, mostly building CRUD apps and doing EDI integrations. I'd like to find a practical side project using machine learning and/or data science that could add value at work, but for the life of me I can't come up with any problems that I couldn't solve with a relational database (postgres) and a data transformation step. I've spent some time learning pytorch, numpy, and pandas but I know that if I don't use it, especially at work, I'll just forget everything I've learned. My boss is a dev and is generally supportive of learning new things and finding ways to innovate independently, so if I can come up with a good idea I'm sure he'll let me pursue it in my spare time. Has anyone tried to do this before? Any suggestions would be great.