Safety managers at five commercial fleets are getting their first look at Driver•i, a new artificial intelligence app from Netradyne that allows them to discuss safety issues to mitigate risks.
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“Essentially, this means that all of the help center content we have built over the past five years will be available directly to the fleet manager or security officer,” says Barrett Young, director of marketing at Netradyne. “Instead of looking at articles about how to do something or what something means, they can just ask an interactive question to an AI tool and it will provide all the information they need.”
According to Yang, Driver•i reduces risk by helping safety managers and fleet managers resolve risk issues faster. The system evaluates drivers, providing managers with more accurate information about their strengths and weaknesses. This information is presented in the form of an assistant safety manager that managers can use as a co-pilot.
“The fleet manager might say, ‘Hey, Joe is going to run a route to Seattle from Colorado, maybe Denver, next Friday. Provide a risk assessment for this route based on weather, driving scores, and other road conditions. and the like,” he explained. “The AI can come back and say that the weather is predicted through various weather filters as snowy and rainy for a 10-day forecast. Joe’s driving history was not good under such conditions. We can recommend another driver to take this route knowing that these relevant criteria are in place.”
Similarly, Driver•i can manage the training of drivers to improve their abilities. “If I spend four hours a day looking at and analyzing which drivers need training, and then another four hours during the day doing the training process, then I can only serve four drivers a day,” Young said. “If I can cut four hours a day of analyzing which drivers to train, then I can go from four hours of analysis to maybe 30 minutes, and I can increase the number of drivers I train per day by 50– 100%. This way I can work on more factors at the same time and eliminate risks faster.”
The average fleet safety manager can oversee anywhere from 10 to 30 or 40 drivers, which may mean that once he evaluates and works with everyone, he has to start all over again to re-evaluate and update these drivers, according to the young.
He expects that more than 50%, and possibly more than 70% of Netradyne’s customers will eventually sign up to use Driver•i. “Nine out of 10 customers we talk to are very excited to try and test it,” Yang said.
