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Geotab’s Edward Kulperger and Roula Vrsic spoke to us about the various AI products the company has unveiled, the response from clients and how 2024 will be the ‘year of trust in AI’.
Generative AI remains a hot topic in the tech sector, so its no surprise that it is making a mark on fleet management software.
The potential for this technology to optimise how businesses operate was discussed heavily at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC), with many companies expressing excitement over how it will be used – while others raised concerns about the hype.
But the telecoms sector isn’t the only one that showcased its products at the annual tech event, as one company – Geotab – showed off its latest advancements in the fleet management market. The company helps businesses keep track of their vehicles and find new ways to optimise their fleets.
The Canadian company spoke to SiliconRepublic.com at last year’s MWC event to give an overview of its plans for the future. Speaking to us this year, Geotab has revealed how it is expanding across the world and its new range of AI-powered tools for its customers.
New opportunities with AI
Edward Kulperger, senior VP of Geotab EMEA, said that besides the growth of Geotab’s business operations, the company has also been investing in its innovation – such as how it integrates with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
“Now we have coverage pretty much globally with all the different OEMs, whether it’s a passenger vehicle, light commercial vehicle or heavy goods vehicle,” Kulperger said. “We continue to invest in EV technology, so understanding the data that comes from these electric vehicles is not trivial.
“As a data orgnaisation, this is obviously very important. It allows our customers and partners to make decisions based on what the battery management system is telling the driver and the dispatcher.”
But the other half of Geotab’s innovation focus has been AI, which Kulperger described as an almost natural progression for the company.
“Our CEO is a technologist at heart and has been involved in data and artificial intelligence since the early 2000s,” he said. “So, we have a long history of AI and leveraging our data lake to understand what’s happening within the vehicle.”
This has led Geotab to release its Safety Centre product, which is connected to the company’s MyGeotab platform. This tool uses AI to help businesses quickly discover performance risks within their fleet, so they can focus more time and effort on ways to fix these risks such as vehicle repairs or improved driver training.
“We go pretty deep on the parameters that would lend to unsafe driving or an unsafe vehicle and try to proactively stop that,” Kulperger said. “By understanding this vehicle or this driver could be in an accident in the next 100,000 kilometres … we can influence that by coaching and helping the driver out.”
Roula Vrsic, Geotab’s senior VP of marketing, said the tool also allows businesses to see their collision risk and benchmark against similar fleets, while providing “all safety data in one UI”.
This Safety Centre also allows businesses to get extra detail about both major or minor collisions, which Geotab said is particularly important for companies that rent out their vehicles as they can go over the incident to determine who or what was the cause of any collision.
Geotab also recently unveiled its own generative AI chatbot to support fleets worldwide called Geotab Ace. This AI assistant is able to provide customers with quick, detailed insights about their fleets and their drivers through simple text prompts.
Vrsic said this chatbot uses the company’s own data and provides links to where it gathered its insights from. In early tests with some companies, Vrsic said clients went to validate the accuracy of the model and that “their jaws would drop”.
“2023 was the year of AI, but 2024 – our prediction – is going to become the year of trust in AI,” Vrsic said. “The only way you get to that trust is by working with your customers to understand what the challenges are.
“So, what we learned was let’s just make sure that we include how did we get to this response, so if someone wants to replicate it, they can go and replicate it.”
Plans for the future
Geotab appears to have a dual focus on enhancing its services with AI tools while expanding rapidly in the fleet management and connected vehicles market.
Since last year, Geotab has grown from roughly 3.25m connected vehicles to more than 4m in 130 countries – a significant leap for a company founded in 2000. The company now has approximately 40,000 cloud platform customers and processes 75bn data points daily.
“I’ve been in telematics for 20 plus years – 12 with Geotab – and I’ve never been more bullish on the market than I am today,” Kulperger said. “In Europe, we’re growing 30pc year over year, so we’re having just a great growth trajectory.”
The company has also been making its presence felt more in Ireland over the past year, as it partnered with broadband company Siro to help transition its fleet to EVs.
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