Although Motive has already been using artificial intelligence (AI) in its dashcam and fuel purchasing solutions, the AI-powered integrated operations platform unveiled major advances this week in how it will use AI to make fleets and drivers safer and automate managers' workflows. Motive can now even provide personalized driver coaching through AI.

Motive’s second annual customer conference, Vision 25, was held in Austin, Texas, and company leaders shared the details with attendees. The inaugural conference, Vision 24, was held last year in Nashville, Tennessee.

“We are going to continue to solve new problems and expand the scope of this platform, but there's another major opportunity that has emerged recently that is essential to the success of your organizations, and that is AI,” said Shoaib Makani, co-founder and CEO of Motive. 

Motive has been building AI since 2017, when the company first started training computer vision models to monitor for unsafe driving behavior, but now the potential of AI extends beyond driver safety. 

“AI can transform every aspect of your operations—service verification, preventive maintenance, fraud detection, automated coaching, and so much more,” Makani told Vision 25 attendees.

New Era of AI Capabilities

Motive is bringing different data sets into play, so how do you connect the dots and provide insights and automation that can benefit fleets? Work Truck met at length with Abhishek Gupta, vice president of product management at Motive, to dig into the details.

“How do you automate those workflows, and how do you leverage AI to really enable new use cases that haven't been solved before? That’s where we're going this year,” Gupta explained. He termed the announcements as the unveiling of the next era of AI-powered capabilities.

“This takes Motive from talking about AI as being one of our core principles in the past, to really showing how AI is at the heart of everything that we do,” he explained. 

Gupta said Motive is really pushing AI capabilities that he not only called the most accurate in the market, but that also solve meaningful problems for customers and will automate many workflows.

“We believe that's what's going to give our customers a chance to really do more and improve lives and profitability for their businesses,” Gupta added.

Building on the Previous AI Capabilities

Motive has been working with AI for several years, and Gupta said that this has been most evident in Motive’s AI Dashcam.

“Historically, we've done a lot with AI, from detecting things like collisions to driver safety and facial recognition systems. What you're going to see is a new era of AI, where AI-powered operations across the entire platform will expand more where we already excel, which is on the safety side,” Gupta said. “So, it's really thinking about AI more holistically.”

He explained AI is now about scaling labor, saving time, and driving profitability. 

“It's going to be all those things,” Gupta said. “You see a lot of the hype today around AI, but we really believe that the only real value you'll get from it is if it's one of those three vectors.”

Using AI to Increase Driver Safety

Driver fatigue causes over 100,000 crashes and 800 deaths each year. 

Fatigued driving and unsafe parking contribute to thousands of crashes, injuries, and deaths each year. At Vision 25, Motive announced new safety AI-powered models to address these risks.

Driver Fatigue Index

Motive’s new Driver Fatigue Index analyzes more than 10 fatigue indicators, such as yawning, eye rubbing, lack of movement, and abnormal speed changes, to detect and alert drivers and managers to drowsy driving before a crash.

“What we have seen with fatigue is that it's not usually just that you do one thing, and suddenly you get into an accident. It's always been a lead-up series of events,” Gupta explained, as he detailed how Motive has studied 30-minute segments of data leading up to accidents.

“We see a driver rubbing their eyes, maybe yawning, maybe blinking, maybe swerving a little bit, and they show all these little signs and indications that they're deeply fatigued,” he added. “We think this is a really novel way to solve the problem of fatigue using our data,” Gupta said.

Lane Swerving Detection 

Motive has six key pillars, one of which is driver safety. A key component of Motive’s approach to driver safety is its AI Dashcam and the related technology, both existing and the latest additions.

Lane Swerving Detection, another AI-powered tool just announced, works with AI Dashcam to flag repeated swerving, which is often a sign of fatigue or distraction.

“We see about an 80% collision reduction rate with our customers adopting the camera within 12 months of deploying it. I think with the launch of these new models, we can push that number much higher,” Gupta said. 

He pointed out that even a 5% to 10% increase in the collision reduction rate saves millions of dollars, but it also means more drivers get home safely.

“We really believe strongly that the impact of these three new models alone can have a ton of impact on the industry,” he added.

Unsafe Parking Detection 

Unsafe Parking Detection alerts managers in real-time when a vehicle is pulled over in a high-risk area and can help prevent “sitting duck” collisions.

Most products in the market today use only telematics to detect unsafe parking, explained Gupta. But Motive now offers more.

There are a lot of challenges with that because they'll just pick up normal parking on the side of a curb as unsafe parking, noted Gupta. 

“But, computer vision allows you to do that in a much more effective manner, because it can pick up the true instances when someone parks unsafely and has a risk of a collision,” said Gupta.

Using AI for Driver Coaching

With AI Coach, Motive hopes to solve fleets' challenges with managing safety and coaching drivers. 

Gupta pointed out how one fleet manager could be responsible for coaching 50 drivers, reviewing all their videos, and then deciding every week which ones to prioritize for coaching. What does that fleet manager do to coach everyone? There simply may not be enough time.

“It's a very challenging problem to be able to do effectively and do well at scale,” Gupta said. 

AI Coach uses an AI avatar to deliver coaching to a driver. A fleet or safety manager can use a provided avatar or simply become one. Motive can capture a person’s voice, likeness, and mannerisms, and them bring all that to life as an avatar.

Basically, if you are a safety manager, Motive can turn you into an avatar, and then your drivers will see that lifelike version of you. But that is just part of the time savings. 

AI Coach can determine what each driver needs to be coached on based on data collected from their driving. It can point out both the good and provide directions on what behaviors need to be improved. And, it is personalized to that specific driver.

“Let's say, I was your driver, and last week I had a bunch of cell phone violations, and I was tailgating and speeding a bunch. The video itself would be of you (the avatar) telling me of all the instances in which I could have improved, and it'll be personalized to me,” Gupta explained. “I think that's a way to scale coaching.”

“Think of it as a generative AI product, which will basically replicates your ability to coach your drivers on your behalf,” Gupta explained. “The goal here is to do coaching at scale.”

Gupta said this will be the industry's first AI avatar that can automate and deliver coaching.

“The benefit of this is going to be tremendous, because not only is it great for you from a labor standpoint, but from a safety standpoint. That's really where you're going to see the benefits of coaching come out at just a much broader scale,” he added.

$250K Fraud Protection Guarantee

The company announced, this week, a $250,000 fraud protection guarantee for customers using Motive's fuel cards.

“Because we combine so many different data points, we use AI to basically prevent the transaction from happening before it can be fully processed,” Gupta said.  “We use a combination of spend data, GPS locations, vehicle diagnostics like fuel tank levels, and we are using AI to combine all these different data points to flag these transactions. We take that a step further and basically prevent it from happening.”

According to Gupta, in 2024, Motive saw 80,000 attempted unauthorized transactions that AI prevented, saving customers $55 million.

Motive Analytics Provides Insight

Motive Analytics is an AI-powered suite of reporting and analysis capabilities. 

“Really simply, we are going to be embedding the ability for customers to have live dashboards, reports, and insight into their business within the product. But we will go a step further and allow you to interact with it as if it's an AI assistant,” he explained. “So, you can ask questions like, ‘How many drivers did I have last week had fraudulent transactions?’ for example, or ‘How many drivers drove through a certain area?’ or ‘How many on-time deliveries?’”

Motive also debuted AI Assistant this week during Vision 25.

“AI Assistant is really all about, how do we help fleets deal with the disruptive, unpredictable things that can happen,” Gupta explained.

“One of the big challenges of running a large fleet, running a large business, is anything that can happen one day can throw off your entire plan for the day,” he said.

That could include dealing with a vehicle breakdown, a late delivery that throws the delivery schedule off, bad weather that impacts travel, or many other disruptive events that fleet managers face.

“Let's say you're supposed to tell certain drivers of a weather incident happening at a location that they're going to and you missed it because you're doing something else for 30 minutes. You forgot to tell them about it, and now they get into a snowstorm,” Gupta used as an example.

The AI Assistant will detect these issues proactively on a fleet manager’s behalf, recommend certain actions, and then basically allow you to take action with a single click. 

Workforce Management Through AI

Workforce Management is Motive’s first foray into helping customers understand how to manage their employees at scale and through the lifecycle. It can help fleets automate the process of driver retention and the process of managing those drivers.

“It centralizes everything from time tracking, timecard management, to document qualification, training, coaching, into one AI-powered platform connected to the rest of the Motive system,” Gupta said.

By connecting employee records to vehicle and driver safety data, Motives gives a fleet more visibility. 

“I think this has room to transform our customers' operations quite a bit,” Gupta said.