Fleets turn to AI to extend the reach of driver coaching

Higby, Ramsey and Whitson discuss how AI can enhance driver coaching at Motive's Vision 26. (Seth Clevenger/Transport Topics)

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Driver coaching is an essential part of any fleet safety program, but transportation businesses have long struggled to provide consistent feedback to their entire driver base due to limited time and resources.

Some fleet operators, however, are expanding the scope of their coaching programs through artificial intelligence and automated safety guidance.

Safety managers at two large carriers discussed how they are using AI tools to provide more timely guidance to their drivers during technology vendor Motive’s Vision 26 summit this summer.

Motive last year introduced AI Coach, which delivers personalized feedback to drivers through AI-generated videos with safety score updates and recaps incorporating driving footage captured by its dashcam system.

Flatbed hauler Bennett Family of Cos. has been actively testing those AI capabilities, which have helped the company take a more comprehensive approach to driver coaching, said Jared Whitson, the fleet’s senior director of safety and compliance.

Previously, coaching was largely reactive and focused primarily on the most serious safety-related incidents.

“You were essentially drowning in data, trying your best to prioritize it, trying your best to see what you needed to see,” Whitson said. “But there was always this sense of, ‘What am I missing?’ ”

While the company was already catching “the worst of the worst” cases, it was only a fraction of the potential opportunities to improve driver behavior.

“I can now touch 100% of my drivers,” Whitson said during a May 28 panel discussion at the Motive conference.

In addition to driving further improvement in safety performance, liability protection is another important factor.

Fleets that extend coaching to all drivers and better utilize the data they are collecting on driver performance are in a stronger position to defend their safety practices in a highly litigious operating environment, Whitson said.

“All of a sudden, I’ve got a solid answer in a courtroom,” he said.

Bennett, based in McDonough, Ga., ranks No. 38 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest for-hire carriers in North America.

Jason Ramsey, North American land transportation manager at oil field services giant Halliburton, agreed that coaching drivers at scale has been a longstanding challenge for fleet operators.

“How do we get more drivers coached in an efficient manner to be able to propagate that safety culture all the way through the system?” he said.

Ramsey said Halliburton’s private fleet has embraced AI coaching videos to more effectively spread its driver training and safety strategies fleetwide.

“We’re getting that extra penetration,” he said. “We can see it on our dashboard. We can see who’s actually watching it.”

Halliburton, based in Houston, ranks No. 9 on the TT Top 100 list of the largest private carriers in North America.

Jim Higby, safety and compliance strategy lead at Motive, positioned the latest wave of generative AI as the next big step forward in the progression of driver coaching over the decades.

Decades ago, business leaders embraced a behavior-based approach to safety with an emphasis on observing employees working in their environment. That was difficult for fleets, though, because they couldn’t have a trainer ride with every driver at every moment.

“You had to pick your people and times,” Higby said.

In practice, it meant that fleets generally focused their coaching efforts on new drivers or those who had been involved in a safety incident.

Advances in technology have unlocked further improvements.

The rise of telematics in particular provided fleets with greater visibility into how their drivers were performing out on the road, including key metrics such as speeding and hard braking incidents.

What was missing, however, was the broader context. While hard braking, for example, can be an indicator for aggressive driving, there are times when it is the right response. It was left to drivers themselves, though, to fill in the details.

The first wave of onboard cameras added video that could show what happened in a crash and exonerate drivers, but it was cumbersome to extract information from the video on a larger scale.

Today’s AI-enabled dashcams now provide much easier access to information on driver performance, Higby said.

“The challenge now is how do you manage all that all that data? You have more information than ever,” he said.

The panelists pointed to automated coaching through generative AI as an example of how fleets can take that next step and act upon that data they are already collecting.