An artificial intelligence (AI) powered future might feel inevitable these days, but realizing a smart, connected tomorrow requires a lot of work today.
Technology companies across the globe are working relentlessly to determine the best AI-driven paths forward for their business, and in trucking, the story’s no different.
Integrating AI enhancements into solutions dealers and aftermarket operations are already using requires careful, tactical product development by vendors.
Customers love new features — when they work. But advancements as revolutionary and groundbreaking as AI can fall flat if not developed, tested and launched with customer experience in mind.
Evaluating where AI fits
“We like to ask the question ‘What problem are we solving?” says Kyle Cooper, managing director of SaaS for Diesel Laptops. “When you’re adding any technology, you have to know what you’re trying to do.”
At Diesel Laptops, the goal is improving shop efficiency. “We don’t need our AI to recite French poetry, we need it to help make technicians more efficient,” he says.
Efficiency is a guiding principle for Decisiv, too.
“When thinking about AI and how it’s used, there are two big categories — you can make your customers more efficient and you can raise the quality of the data in your ecosystem,” says Vice President of Data Services Nick Pittinger.
Procede also is striving to do both in a measured way, says CEO Larry Kettler.
The company has an internal committee that has monitored AI innovations for years. Kettler says the group’s directive isn’t just to identify opportunities, but also consider implementation and eventual user benefits to ensure the company is investing in the best integrations to enhance its Excede DMS.
In developing the committee, Kettler remembers, “One thing we didn’t want to do was be too early [to AI].” Procede customers are using Excede all day every day; Kettler says the company has a responsibility to them to make sure all new features added to the platform immediately improve their user experience.
“We always want to minimize the impact a change has on customers,” he says.
[RELATED: Procede Software debuts newest update to Excede]
A similar tactic is in effect at Karmak.
“Our approach to onboarding AI involves strategic alignment with our business goals, incremental validation through internal pilot projects and demonstrations and close collaboration with our teams and select customers to ensure solutions deliver tangible value, ease of adoption and measurable impact upon broader implementation,” says John Cowan, vice president of business solutions.
Security and data privacy
Like any new feature, integrating AI into technology requires product development. But what’s unique about the development process regarding AI is the added security required.
Artificial intelligence, machine learning and other advanced computing solutions don’t just use algorithms to analyze inputs and produce outputs in a closed system. Artificial intelligence remembers everything it learns. This is a challenge for vendors who want to provide AI functionality to users but must maintain data privacy across user bases.
Eventually, most vendors come to the same crossroads: leverage an outside provider’s AI product and work with said provider to create a closed ecosystem where a user’s data is secure; or develop the AI capabilities internally.
[RELATED: Could AI help you sell truck parts?]
Industry vendors are choosing the latter — for security and efficiency reasons.
“When you’re in that buy-build-partner scenario, you have to be able determine how you will keep your customer’s data secure,” says Leigh Ann Conver, senior director of marketing for CDK Intelligence. “But also, if you choose to partner with someone, they are not going to have access to the data that makes the AI work.”
That proximity to and understanding of data is really what makes AI work, Conver says.
“You can have all the data in the world but if you don’t know how to apply it, you’re not going to be able to provide something of value,” she says. “We know our customers and we understand their businesses … We believe we have the right people to deliver [AI benefits] ourselves.”
Procede also has leveraged its internal product development team to bring the company’s earliest AI enhancements into Excede, creating what Kettler calls a “walled garden” in which user data securely interacts with the company’s proprietary AI solutions.
“By creating a private infrastructure, we don’t have to worry about someone’s intellectual property getting into an open system,” says CTO Robert Stockfleth.
Building and implementing AI solutions
Yet security and data access aren’t the only requirements for building AI tools.
Product developers also must understand the problem AI is seeking to solve, how users have solved it in the past, and how to integrate AI’s solution into users’ workflows.
Vendors say customer input during the development process is essential for this reason. A new time-saving AI resource is no different than a simple widget if a customer doesn’t understand what it does and won’t (or can’t) use it.
“We ask ourselves on every single feature we add, ‘Will this require a change for our customers?’” says Eric Fortin, Procede’s senior vice president of product. “Nothing leads to the failure to adopt a new feature faster than ‘You have to retrain on this.’”
Development is similar at Karmak, where Cowan says clearly defining and highlighting ROI benchmarks is fundamental to all new features, enhancements and solutions.
“Our product team operates with a core principle of ‘ROI or Why?’ — ensuring every initiative has clearly quantifiable value,” he says.
Pittinger agrees, noting Decisiv not only communicates with customers to determine where product enhancements would be valuable, but also during development and testing to ensure the innovations will be seamlessly integrated into their daily operations. Customers appreciate the engagement even if they’re uninterested in the development process.
“They don’t really worry about the how, they leave that to us,” he says.
Which is fine, vendors add. What ultimately matters is how the technology works on the front end once its live.
“User experience is so important,” says Decisiv President Tim Hardin. “For example, there’s a big difference in having [Microsoft] Copilot running in the background all the time and having to click into Copilot to use it.”
“[AI] is just like any other technology where it won’t do anything to help customers if they don’t use it, which is why building it into the user’s workflow is so important. It has to be seamless,” Conver says.
Cooper agrees, adding the best way to reduce customer fear and hesitancy around a new innovation is to roll it out so flawlessly customers don’t even notice.
“If I had my way, you would never know when we release an AI tool. It would just become part of the solution,” he says.
One thing’s for sure, now that it’s here, AI won’t be going away.
“AI already has, and is going to continue to, permeate every part of our world,” says Kettler. “I think the future is really bright for what we can do with it and where collaboratively our customers will have us take it.”
