Motive Focuses on AI for Trucking at Vision Conference
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AUSTIN, Texas — Technology developer Motive focused on helping the transportation sector better understand how to use artificial intelligence through product launches and panel discussions during an industry event it hosted here.
The San Francisco-based company unveiled equipment and platform enhancements during its , including a new analytics platform, workforce management tools, real-time alerts and fraud prevention tools. It also debuted new safety models focused on driver fatigue, lane swerving and unsafe parking.
“Our work here will never be done,” Motive CEO Shoaib Makani said during a keynote address. “We are going to continue to solve new problems and expand the scope of this platform. But there is another major opportunity that has emerged recently that is essential to the success of your organizations, and that is AI.”
Motive entered the AI space in 2017 with training models designed to monitor unsafe driving behavior. Since then, it has expanded into use cases that include service verification, preventive maintenance, fraud detection and automated coaching.
“With any new technology, there is going to be challenges,” Makani said. “A hallucination is okay here and there if you’re working in the kitchen or you’re playing trivia,” he noted, referring to the term for an AI glitch, “but there is zero tolerance for error in your operations, because the stakes are so high. That is why we are so focused on accuracy when it comes to building AI models for you.”
Specifically, Makani said Motive is working to eliminate false positives so carriers aren’t burdened with events and alerts that aren’t real. It is also keeping humans in the development loop to review outputs as AI models evolve.
“We have several products, but our emphasis for a long time has been on the computer vision and AI to drive safety for our fleets,” Jai Ranganathan, chief product officer at Motive, told Transport Topics. “One thing we realize is that there is still a lot of back-office operations that are fairly mundane and extremely time-consuming. We looked pretty deeply into how people spend their time managing fleets, and realized that there’s a large opportunity for us to use technology to dramatically improve productivity for these folks.”
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Ranganathan noted opportunity exists to reduce repetition and improve speed.
“The general problem is that there are huge amounts of productivity losses because of mundane activities,” Ranganathan said. “So a large part of our emphasis in this cycle has been to alleviate those problems and automate as much as possible. And if it’s not automated, make it much faster and easier for these back-office folks, thereby freeing their time to do more high-value work for their businesses.”
Motive is also working to streamline communications for operations teams by introducing its AI Assistant. The program automatically provides real-time alerts for time-sensitive issues by surfacing contextual insights, as well as suggestions for the best actions to take.
“We see more than a million messages a month going between drivers and back-office people,” Ranganathan said. “A lot of this can be automated. [A] simple example is weather alerts. Drivers come out to do their jobs [and] fleets will send them alerts saying, ‘The areas where you’re going to be working today, there’s a snowstorm coming.’ ”
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The company also introduced Motive AI Coach, a tool designed to help drivers improve through personalized AI-generated video reports.
“We don’t want to just give a generic script that isn’t very meaningful or relatable,” Nihar Gupta, the senior director of product management at Motive, said during a session. “It has to be very hyper-specific to that driver. What did that driver do in the last week, what kinds of events have they generate, how’s it impacting their safety score? So we do that in a very specific and structured way, such that we can get the output we want.”
Gupta said the information will be conveyed to drivers initially via a weekly safety recap. The reports feature an AI-generated coach providing a recap of how the driver performed on the road and suggesting areas of possible improvement. The coach avatar, voice and script can be tailored to specific drivers.
“We start with the introduction,” Gupta said. “We want this AI coach to be somebody that the drivers can get to know effectively, somebody that’s relatable. They’re going to be hearing from this coach, theoretically, every week, and maybe even with higher frequency as we continue to iterate on this feature.”
