Artificial Intelligence drives the trucking industry

Artificial intelligence could forever alter the trucking sector with driverless vehicles, but some companies are using game-changing technology to make the vehicles safer and their fleet more efficient.

Software company Samsara has created an A.I powered “coach” which analyzes cameras to, among other things,  scan environments and even keep tabs on drivers. The A.I.provides in-cab audible coaching to a driver by analyzing the cab-facing and road-facing cameras in real-time and sends instant alerts to the company’s headquarters.

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One of the companies that uses the software is Good Greek Moving & Storage in Florida. “The AI software will alert us if a driver is on the phone, if the driver’s texting, if the driver is smoking, because they have no smoking policy,” company founder & CEO Spero Georgedakis told FOX Business. “So it’s safety features. It’s also making sure that they’re following company policy as well.”

Georgedakis adds, “We can check the speed. We can check whether to make sure that they’re following all the laws of the road, including stopping at stop signs, stopping at red lights. Hard stopping . We can monitor all that.”

The technology, as you can imagine, is dealing with potential legal headaches.  A useful tool in one of the most litigious states in the country with some of the highest insurance rates.

Good Greek Director of Operations, Chris Byrne says “It’s going to pick up everything that happens before, during and after the accident as well as it’ll stay on through the process. And what that does is provides both sides of the story.”

As a result, Georgedakis adds another benefit of the higher levels of safety is lower costs. “We got less incidents of claims, whether that be truck damage, accidents and so forth or even workers compensation claims. In fact, we’ve seen a decrease in our insurance costs and our worker comp rebates as a result of using this AI software.”

But while many companies seem to be eager to adopt the technology, there has been some resistance. According to Byrne: “Most our younger generation coming up, they’re trained on all this in their in their academies, in their classes, in their schools, because it’s so prevalent in almost every trucking company now. But as you get into some of the older range of drivers that were just used to pen and paper. No technology. They’re the ones that are sometimes having some issues with some of the safety features.”

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This report is part of a FOX Business series exploring how Artificial Intelligence is being applied to just about every industry on the planet, bringing with it endless opportunity and some disruptions. Our team of reporters is looking at some of the companies leading the charge, the efforts to create guardrails and how the cutting-edge technology will impact not only your life, but generations to come in our latest AI series.