Is fleet automation the ChatGPT for fleets?

By Aarjav Trivedi, founder and CEO of Ridecell

You’ve likely heard about ChatGPT, the generative AI tool that debuted a few short months ago and has quickly captured the public imagination with its ability to generate sophisticated, human-like responses to almost any question posed to it. 

This is an exciting development, especially for professions that revolve around words, numbers, and knowledge work. But what about industries that rely on fleets of vehicles?

Think here of any last-mile delivery company, shipping and logistics provider, or rental car company. Where is the comparable tool for the companies whose lifeblood is these real-world physical objects that zip around from location to location? 

As it turns out, a similar capability exists in the form of fleet automation. Much the way ChatGPT is revolutionising knowledge work tasks and providing a new productivity arrow in knowledge workers’ quivers, fleet automation is set to redefine the way companies approach fleet management – streamlining operations, removing manual grunt work, and increasing efficiency along the way.

All seeing, all knowing

Part of the genius of ChatGPT was training it on virtually everything that was available to learn from the internet and then teaching it how to communicate in a very natural, user-friendly style. The result? Interacting with ChatGPT is like asking questions of somebody with perfect recall who's read every book that's ever been written. That’s a very useful somebody to have around.

For companies that depend on fleets, fleet automation offers a similarly powerful capability: It’s a way for them to know everything about every vehicle in their fleet. 

This isn’t just about knowing where a vehicle is at any point in time or the last time it got its oil changed, although these are certainly useful pieces of information to have. This is about assimilating all the information from the half dozen to a dozen different fleet management solutions that fleets typically employ – everything from GPS tracking systems, to route optimisation software, preventative maintenance packages, and other tools – and tying it all together.

This “omniscience” is what gives fleet automation its power. In the same way that ChatGPT is trained on nearly all the publicly available information in order to provide the most useful responses, fleet automation is trained on a proprietary set of data specific to a fleet.

And that’s where things get interesting. Because just like ChatGPT, once you have a core set of knowledge at your disposal, you can build functionality on top of it in interesting ways. 

“No lunch for me, thanks”

One of the many use cases for ChatGPT in Corporate America is customer support and communication. The interactive nature of ChatGPT makes it a natural to respond to customer inquiries and automate aspects of support, improving the overall customer experience. 

For example, does a customer need guidance on how best to use a company’s product or service? ChatGPT is on it, analysing the inputted question and instantly providing the customer the information they need – no human interaction required.

Likewise, ChatGPT can be put to work identifying and flagging potential fraud, accelerating a workflow that might’ve previously required manual intervention.

Fleet automation accomplishes a similar trick when it comes to automating communications, removing friction, and cutting out the ‘middle-man’.

Let’s say that the check engine light flashes on in one of the vehicles in the fleet. Fleet automation ensures that as soon as that occurs, the system interprets the error code and then takes the appropriate action to remedy the fault (i.e., the vehicle is automatically scheduled to come in for service).

Additionally, a work order is automatically created notifying the mechanic that a vehicle is coming their way for a check-up, so that time is reserved on their calendar to attend to this task.

Meanwhile, the driver who was scheduled to use that vehicle later in the day is automatically reassigned to a different vehicle and given digital keys to the replacement vehicle.

All of this workflow is accomplished without a human having to manually step in to make it happen – fleet automation just takes care of it.

Like ChatGPT, it never gets bored, it never gets tired, and it never goes on a lunch break. It just performs whatever task it’s been handed with a smile.

Time for transformation

In the same way that ChatGPT is transforming vast swaths of knowledge work – taking manual tasks off people’s plates, automating parts of their day-to-day work, and freeing them up to focus on higher value activities – fleet automation is poised to have a similar impact on the variety of different businesses that rely on fleets of vehicles. 

As the renowned computer scientist Alan Turing once said: "We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done."

Embracing the power of fleet automation will enable businesses with fleets to tackle all that “needs to be done” more efficiently, propelling them towards a promising future.