Penske powers up Catalyst AI to turn fleet complexity into a competitive advantage
ORLANDO, Florida—Penske Truck Leasing is enhancing its artificial intelligence-fueled fleet management platform for commercial transportation, which its leaders said would make complex data more usable, scalable, and actionable.
A typical telematics can send up to 30 data points to fleets anywhere from every five seconds to every five minutes. “How do you make sense of all that?” asked Tim Haynes, VP of digital and customer data for Penske Transportation Solutions. “Think of it as sensory overload.”
Penske’s Catalyst AI uses machine learning to help fleets use their data for faster, more strategic decision-making across operations, Haynes told FleetOwner during a demo of Penske’s Catalyst AI during the National Private Truck Council’s annual convention here.
“You have all this noise going on around you,” he noted. “How do you distill that down and turn it into something meaningful? That’s part of what our algorithms do—but this is not pure AI. It is AI with people involved, and it’s common sense.”
Catalyst AI, which launched a little more than a year ago, is gaining four core enhancements this month to help fleet managers understand their data better:
- Fantasy fleet: Offers a new comparison set of top-performing vehicles most similar to each truck in the user’s fleet, helping them find gaps and elevate performance.
- Vehicle-level comparison: Enables users to compare individual vehicles to pinpoint performance differences, helping identify where targeted adjustments can drive better results.
- Hub-level comparison: Allows users to assess operations by location and uncover opportunities for improved efficiency at the local level.
- Impacting metrics: Gives users the ability to focus on specific metrics that matter most to their business, fuel efficiency, maintenance costs, utilization, and more.
“We’ve enhanced the platform’s ability to surface trends, benchmark at the vehicle level, and identify meaningful outliers across fleets and facilities,” Art Vallely, president of Penske Truck Leasing, said. “Built in-house, the platform was designed to help our customers spend less time chasing data and more time improving performance.”
Catalyst Al already supports thousands of fleets, according to Penske. Haynes said it is helping fleet leaders move from lagging metrics to leading decisions. The platform is now a foundational part of how teams across Penske’s network report, benchmark, and plan across vehicles, locations, and systems.
See also: 2025 FleetOwner 500: Private
AI has more room to grow in trucking
Penske’s 2025 Transportation Leaders Survey: A Road to AI Adoption found that 93% of senior business decision makers in the transportation and logistics industry agree that AI will improve their organization’s resiliency and ability to adapt to sudden shifts.
More than half (54%) said the ability to compare their fleet’s performance to others in the same market would improve both efficiency and operational decision-making. As they specifically plan for today’s continued economic uncertainty, fleet leaders cited their most critical data needs as follows: visibility into maintenance costs (44%), fuel price trends (41%), and fleet utilization (36%).
Organizations that have embraced AI are already reaping the benefits, with 40% of respondents using AI tools saying they’ve seen improvements of at least 50% in fuel usage, cost reduction, or distance traveled through smarter routing and optimization.
However, 84% of transportation leaders think the industry lags in AI adoption, and 36% only feel somewhat prepared to respond to ongoing supply chain disruptions and economic volatility. This signals a growing urgency for tools that provide data and translate it into tangible actions that drive outcomes, such as lowering operating costs and increasing efficiency.
Catalyst Al is embedded within Comparative Insights, a feature inside the Fleet Insight digital platform. At the fleet level, Comparative Insights, powered by Catalyst AI, is available at no cost to Penske customers. The new Comparative Insights Premium Plan unlocks access to vehicle- and hub-level comparisons and the Fantasy Fleet feature, with a 30-day free trial available before subscription.
