Artificial intelligence has gone from a buzzword to a necessity for technology companies—even in the trucking industry. While there isn’t much concern that AI will replace drivers anytime soon (at least for now), white collar job holders in the trucking industry—those in back-office operations and administration—could be the first ones to go.
For decades, AI software tools were designed to make labor more productive, Jonah McIntire, Trimble Transportation’s chief product and technology officer, said during a recent AI media roundtable. But generative AI, which was brought to the mainstream just a few years ago, has changed AI software’s purpose.
“With generative AI, the software is the labor,” McIntire said.
Trimble Transportation, a trucking technology company, offers AI-powered products and solutions to assist the trucking industry. As part of the roundtable discussion, McIntire, along with two other industry experts, Michael Kornhauser, who leads Trimble’s transportation and logistics sector in North America, and Philipp Pfister, who leads the same sector in Europe, offered their perspectives on the current landscape, trends, and future of AI in the trucking industry.
A trucking industry AI update
AI has advanced significantly since the introduction of ChatGPT, which essentially brought generative AI to the mainstream in November 2022. McIntire compared AI’s progression to the development of the internet.
“It’s like the internet revolution but packaged into a couple of years instead of a couple of decades,” he said. “Generative AI feels like it’s in more of an accelerated, world-changing moment.”
How will it change the world, exactly?
While the full extent of AI’s reach can’t be known today, Trimble’s experts predict significant change will happen in the labor force for digitally dependent jobs, which, in the trucking industry, include back-office staff and administrative work.
A recent survey from consulting firm McKinsey and Company found that, industry-wide, up to 90% of trucking companies use AI in their operations, McIntire said, noting these companies are using either generative AI or less sophisticated predictive AI. However, among Trimble’s customers, McIntire said the use of AI is closer to 100%.
See also: How fleets are leveraging AI to boost operations
Trucking AI trends
While most trucking companies aren’t replacing human employees with AI bots today, AI is being used to automate multiple back-office tasks, many of which McIntire described as “quaint,” and largely revolve around generating revenue and lowering costs.
These methods include using AI to write customer emails indicating price increases. One trucking company, Action Resources, uses AI chatbots to offer its customers quick and simple information by simply typing in a question on its website, Jeff Cowart, Action Resources chief information officer, said at an industry conference last year that FleetOwner covered.
Another trucking company, Gulf Relay, uses AI to create custom workflows for its back-office team, essentially eliminating hours of tedious labor, Ken Apple, the company’s VP of software engineering, said at the same industry conference.
Further, Trimble has an AI tool to help its customers in “deal making,” McIntire said. Trimble’s AI offerings include price negotiation solutions for its customers. It can also help customers identify potential business partners, facilitating the discovery and negotiation process. The AI agent can help determine what types of services a potential shipping partner is interested in, the price they’re willing to pay, and even lock that in. Trimble can also help with the “ingestion of emails and converting them to systemic transactions” as well as offering real-time visibility of shipments, McIntire said.
And all of these solutions take place while human office employees work on other tasks.
See also: How AI could streamline your trucking operations in 2025
While it sounds like a dream come true, AI’s dependence on data could be seen as a drawback for those who aren’t keeping a close eye on the accuracy of their data. Data is what can differentiate or disable AI’s ability to perform for the fleet, McIntire said. Because of that, fleets should ensure the data being entered by employees and captured by telematics devices is “clean” and accurate.
Trimble ensures its data capture is accurate by taking steps to validate it, McIntire said. Further, Trimble also vets its network partners and works to ensure clean data from the beginning.
“Putting this groundwork in at the beginning of the collaboration enables greater success at a later stage and in making sure that the data is ready,” Pfister explained.
Customers can also see whether their data is ready to be used with AI through Trimble’s dashboard, Pfister said. When customers “want to apply an AI use case, we can basically pull this out [and] look at it with a customer and say ... ‘We have maybe eight out of 10 information fields that we need from you.’ And then we can make the data basically AI-ready to come to the point that we can train our model based on the data that we need.”
Trimble’s experts advise fleets not to be too concerned about this, however, as newer generations of AI models are much more advanced than previous generations and are more apt to identify incorrect data, such as an unusually low rate for certain shipping lanes.
These days, a generative AI solution can be tasked with reviewing a rate table, for example, and identifying data that is out of the norm and flagging it to be improved, McIntire said.
“You can do quite common-sense evaluations, and I think that creates a guard rail over the most egregious of the ‘bad data leads to bad outcomes’ situations,” he said.
See also: How trucking tech companies leverage AI
What lies ahead for AI’s future in trucking?
AI has experienced rapid growth and expansion in just a few short years, and McIntire predicts the industry will see even further advancements within the next 12 months, specifically with communications with drivers.
Using weather data, map data, and other tools, artificial intelligence will monitor a truck’s route. It can reach out to drivers if it sees they are driving an alternate route to inquire as to why, McIntire predicts.
Within the next five years, Trimble believes there will be a labor shift, and AI will run businesses with humans acting as the boss. If this happens, Pfister said leaders should expect to change their methods.
“If you're a people leader, you have a certain type of [leadership] today, as you know your folks that you're leading,” Pfister said. In the future “you're basically leading AI; that means you need to change how you also lead your workforce.”
Until then, AI will continue helping the trucking industry by working in the background.
When Trimble’s customers ask for solutions, even Trimble doesn’t hype its use of AI; instead, the focus is on the value of the solution and improving operations for the fleet.
“From our perspective, it's definitely bringing AI into our products and services to ultimately deliver some outsized outcomes for our customers,” Kornhauser said.
Instead of touting its AI-powered solutions, Kornhauser said Trimble’s focus is simply to deliver results with AI as part of the engine.
