How AI Is Transforming Trucking in the Wake of COVID

Trucking has become an early adopter of AI, contrary to historical trends, experts said. (Just_Super/Getty Images)

[Stay on top of transportation news: Get TTNews in your inbox.]

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The trucking industry has emerged as a leader in adopting artificial intelligence, largely due to lessons learned from the coronavirus pandemic, according to a panel discussion Oct. 13.

American Trucking Associations hosted the panel as part of its 2024 Management Conference & Exhibition. The discussion explored how post-pandemic efficiency needs have driven carriers to adopt AI technologies.

“[AI] is not the autonomous machine out there that’s able to do things on its own,” said Steve Schmidt, coordinator at Drive Safe Missoula. “Essentially what it is, at the stage that we are at with artificial intelligence, is it’s in a generative format, meaning that it requires a human input, human intelligence, to ask it to do something.”

Schmidt compared current large language models to someone memorizing all the books in a library but noted that AI can’t use that information until prompted with a command. He added that AI is online rather than in a physical library.

“AI isn’t really new, it’s been here since the 1950s,” said Evan Welbourne, vice president of machine learning engineering at Samsara. “There’s this latest wave of generative AI, in the last two and a half or three years. What we see is there’s a really compressed adoption cycle, and in some sense, it looks like the adoption we’ve seen before, but it’s a little different.”

Welbourne attributed this difference to the coronavirus pandemic, noting that many businesses, particularly in trucking, turned to technology to improve operations amid economic challenges.

“Many of you had to kick in overdrive,” Welbourne said. “You were the ones that were keeping the economy running, keeping everybody alive. But it was still tough. It’s like all the same constraints everybody else had, but you still had to make ends meet. And in many cases, companies turned to technology for a solution. You can just squeeze out a little bit more efficiency to get by with technology. AI is in the mix there, of course, as a way to optimize.”

Welbourne added that trucking has become an early adopter of these technologies, contrary to historical trends. Samsara data shows 87% of operations leaders already using AI plan to increase their investment.

“One of the things we all like about trucking is that it is pretty simple,” said Rusty Kirby, senior director of transportation at Pilot. “The basics haven’t changed as much. You still need a well-qualified driver to transport the materials safely and efficiently over and over again. What’s changed is our ability to optimize around that very basic activity. For us, we have a pretty complex decision-making tree that goes into assigning work with commodities that change price throughout the day.”

Kirby highlighted how many metrics can change in real time while trucks are on the road, including fuel locations and costs. He noted that AI and other technologies allow carriers to better organize around these variables.

“All that creates a lot of complexity,” Kirby said. “So being able to really communicate, I think, and get that back and forth with the driver instantly, at a scale and speed that you could not really do with a traditional means of communication, so communication has been the biggest deal for us. Not to mention, we got the shipping documents that can return almost instantaneously.”

Schmidt stressed that this greater efficiency is more about better utilizing labor than replacing it. He noted that the technology can free up workers to pursue value-adding tasks elsewhere while improving employee retention.

“I don’t see a single truck in this room, which would lead me to believe that this is still a people-based industry,” Schmidt said. “Utilizing AI to help influence people, and to lead people, and to communicate with one another, so you can analyze, and utilize, and manage the data and the materials that are out there, you can help utilize AI as that tool to get the job done a little bit faster.”