The trucking industry has long had the reputation of being behind the curve when it comes to adopting technology as many processes continue to be manually performed despite the demand for greater efficiency within the supply chain. But telematics providers in the industry are working to bring commercial fleets up to speed, and speed is exactly what Geotab had in mind when it created essentially its own version of the recently popularized Chat GPT.
Geotab is set to launch a beta project that introduces generative AI models into its platform in early July. Project G, which acts as an analytics digital assistant, will use natural language models to transform the process of analyzing fleet data. The project will test a chat interface linked to Geotab Data Connector where customers can get data insights on their fleet based on their specific question.
“My goal is very simple: reduce time to insight, because I think if you can reduce the time to insight, you empower people in the right positions to make decisions faster,” said Mike Branch, Geotab’s vice president of data and analytics. “One of the things that … is always a struggle for customers is people are lost in the world of data. They want to get insights very quickly.
“Sometimes it does become a bit of a struggle to weed through these insights, even though it's on a dashboard, and our hypothesis was that with this wonderful world of generative AI that's out there, is there a world in which we can enable our customers very simply to go on a chat-based interface, ask a question about their fleet, and have it give you that answer very quickly.”
The answer is yes.
Branch said depending on the complexity of the question, so far in testing the solution, responses have been generated in as little as seven seconds and up to 60 seconds.
“We're working very closely and hard to kind of keep those timeframes down as much as possible,” he said.
