Innovative trucking tech unveiled at ATA MCE 2025: enhancing efficiency and connectivity

If you missed the American Trucking Associations' annual Management Conference &  Exhibition, you missed out on insights from economists, learning from industry experts, and networking with peers. You also missed announcements from trucking industry tech companies. Here's a snapshot of trucking tech company announcements that took place in San Diego last week:

Trimble enhances offerings with three additional features

While it’s likely Trimble will save its biggest announcements for its user conference later this month, Dwayne Lazarre, the company’s VP of business development, gave a select group of trade media a rundown of new updates to three products: Freight Marketplace, Freight Visibility, and Autonomous Procurement.

Freight Marketplace: Trimble introduced a centralized, digital freight procurement platform for its North American customers, which is known as Freight Marketplace. It allows Trimble users to find and negotiate rates for freight.

The current marketplace as a whole can be difficult to navigate. “We have carriers, we have shippers … [fleets and companies] of all different sizes, and they have various networks,” Lazarre explained. “What we're attempting to do is give you one place—regardless of the size of carrier or size of shipper you are—and ... give you the opportunity to expand that network.”

The Freight Marketplace allows fleets to find new partners at a productive rate, supporting strategic bids and from a “lane level,” Lazarre said. It also supports the spot market. All of this is available within the Freight Marketplace to prevent users “from jumping from screen to screen.”

Freight Visibility: Trimble’s Freight Visibility tool displays real-time visibility and ETA tracking for all transportation methods. “It doesn’t matter if you’re traveling by air, land, by sea, by train,” Lazarre said.

Trimble uses artificial intelligence to power Freight Visibility; this is to ensure that ETAs are accurate and that schedules align to ensure on-time delivery, Lazarre said. Further, the data flow is bidirectional, meaning that once it’s captured from the vehicle’s GPS or modem, it’s shared with the fleet’s TMS—TMW for Trimble customers—connecting with roughly 3,000 other technology solutions.

This integration has helped Trimble customers improve warehouse productivity by 30% and improve sales by 2%, Lazarre shared. Trimble customers have also cut costs through Freight Visibility: 20% fewer penalties, 10% decrease in admin costs, and 1-3% reduction in freight costs.

Autonomous Procurement: Trimble’s new feature within its Autonomous Procurement platform is a cloud-based module that “transforms” a truckload order workflow using AI and map implementation, Lazarre explained. The goal is to “optimize what you execute,” he said. The feature helps fleets improve network balance, asset utilization, and lane profitability.

The feature allows “shippers to provide additional context to adapt tendering to better match their goals,” a Trimble press release states. This feature includes predictions on asset utilization up to seven days in advance to help fleets feel more comfortable in what they’re tendering.

If a fleet can predict that assets will be used appropriately or that they won’t be under-weighted, then they can feel confident bidding on a load because the platform has given them market condition predictions, Lazarre said.

Trucker Path and Wex partner to deliver fuel savings to drivers

Fuel discounts in the Wex 10-4 app are now available to Trucker Path customers within the Trucker Path app. 

Trucker Path app users now have access to fuel discounts from the 10-4 by Wex network to receive savings from thousands of fueling stations nationwide, including Speedway, Stripes, 7-Eleven, Circle K, Love’s, TA, RaceTrac, and more.

The Trucker Path app will continue to allow drivers to “peruse and see the prices they always have,” Chris Oliver, Trucker Path CMO, told a group of trade media. Then, when drivers choose a fuel station, they are “automatically” navigated to the Wex 10-4 app, where they can “take advantage of all the discounts that are available” and make their transaction.

This partnership also allows Trucker Path users to find details on parking availability, station services, and see station ratings from other drivers.

“We see this as a match made in heaven,” Oliver said. “Trucker Path brings drivers to the table; Wex brings the fleets together. [Trucker Path] navigation is moving into the fleet space. [Wex’s] fuel opportunities are moving into the driver space.”

Drivers who have piloted the system with the partnership enabled have saved between $400 and $500 per month on average, according to Noel Glasgow, VP of North American direct sales at EFS, a Wex company.

“It is a very significant savings to the single owner-operator and the small fleets,” Glasgow said, “because … fuel is one of the most—if not the most—expensive cost for a trucking company.”

Motive adds conversational AI tool to its analytics platform

It’s a known fact that trucking companies are capturing more data than they can handle. Telematics and transportation management providers have begun using artificial intelligence to sort and compile data to help fleets generate actionable insights. Motive is the latest telematics provider to bring an AI solution to market.

A new feature of its analytics platform, which enables fleet leaders to access data across their operations in a single view and build customized reports, AI Answers makes data access even easier. Using a large language model, much like ChatGPT, fleet leaders can type in their questions and instantly view data related to their query. 

“Customers can easily ask questions and get the answer they need without having to know the keywords or go through any dashboard creation to get that information—right at their fingertips,” Emily Parsons, Motive staff product manager, said during the company’s event at MCE.

Parsons said the feature was designed with simplicity and accuracy in mind and likened it to “tapping the shoulder” of an analyst and getting the exact information needed. Insights fleet leaders can glean from this feature are limitless, but Parsons offered a few examples.

“Maybe I just want to understand how my driving distance has been over the last three months,” she said while demonstrating the feature. “Maybe I want to understand ... how does distance change over time?”

Adding this feature to the Motive Analytic platform helps fleet leaders get the best of both worlds, Parsons told FleetOwner. This is because AI Answers is easy and fast enough for even the least tech-savvy team members to get answers to specific questions while allowing the broader Motive Analytics platform to continue offering customized and buildable reports for fleet leaders to dive deep into their own goals and metrics.

BeyondTrucks enables TMS-integrated, AI-powered route optimization

While it’s a valuable tool, until a company has used artificial intelligence long enough to build a perfect algorithm, the need for human interaction is invaluable. With BeyondTrucks’ latest announcement, the platform combines seasoned dispatcher knowledge with AI to optimize routes in real time.

BeyondTrucks CEO Hans Galland said that incorporating AI into dispatching is a win for fleets because relying solely on dispatchers can be costly for three reasons: scalability, bias, and the absence of data. He explained it like this. 

“Firstly, it scales very poorly,” he said during a press conference. “The moment the dispatcher or load planner is sick [or] retires, that experience walks out of the door. Secondly, human decisions are inherently biased. We make decisions with limited computational capabilities, and … human decisions have naturally, in the past, delivered somewhat suboptimal results. And lastly, even if there is some wisdom in the dispatcher’s knowledge, if we just use tribal knowledge, we don’t capture the actual data and that wisdom to make better decisions in the future.”

Additionally, this new feature from BeyondTrucks is integrated directly into the transportation management system (TMS) platform. This means that instead of exporting stops from TMS and pasting them into a route optimizer, risking errors, routing happens natively within the system.

With this new feature, BeyondTrucks also allows dispatchers to make routing changes conversationally through a ChatGPT-style text box.

“For instance, you could [type] ‘Avoid I-95 because there’s inclement weather,’” Galland explained. “You can enter ‘Prioritize deliveries to Walmart over Target,’ or you could [enter] ‘Tonight, don’t assign driver Johnston to overnight routes’ because his wife is sick.”

Once these conversational inputs are added, the routing system recalculates and delivers a new, optimized solution that includes the parameters determined by the dispatcher. Therefore, “at the same time, we’re leveraging the valuable experience that only a dispatcher in that job can have … to deliver better outcomes,” Galland said.