Here's how Trimble's new Arc AI agent enhances efficiency in fleet management
Key takeaways
- Arc connects seamlessly with existing fleet management systems, enabling automation of tasks such as report analysis, data entry, and customer support.
- Organizations can personalize Arc by creating or choosing from a library of skills, with support from Trimble's AI skills team for customization and implementation.
- Built on established large language models, Arc incorporates safety features to ensure secure and reliable enterprise use.
A popular use for AI within the trucking industry is office tasks, such as distilling reports, crawling dash camera footage, and pulling insights from the thousands of data points fleets accumulate daily.
Transportation technology companies have seen this trend and have worked to streamline these manual office tasks even further. Trimble launched its latest AI innovation this week, Trimble Arc Agent.
What is Trimble’s new AI agent, Arc?
Arc “is an agent that is intended to do work autonomously,” Megan Liss, Trimble’s director of AI go-to-market strategy, told FleetOwner. An AI agent, specifically, is “a system that autonomously performs tasks by designing workflows with available tools.”
To accomplish these tasks, Arc connects to a fleet’s current data systems via MCPs (model context protocols) and APIs (application programming interfaces). Applications that connect to Arc include email inboxes, Salesforce accounts, and any program or application with an existing MCP.
What Arc is:
- An AI agent that will complete work on its own with your instruction
- One agent with many skills
- A safe and reliable way for companies to provide an AI agent to employees to simplify workflows
What Arc is not:
- Software or a copilot
- Only a chatbot
Arc is a single agent that is designed to “learn” through training. Multiple employees from the same organization can train Arc on different skill sets personalized to each employee’s specific work functions or preferences.
Trimble customers can create these skills on their own, or they can choose from a range of skills that Trimble team members have already created.
“We have AI skills creators that are actually employees within our applied AI team that partner with our customers to help them in their AI adoption,” Liss said. “It's like an AI consultancy that we offer for our customers.”
It works like this:
- Trimble AI skills creators meet with the Trimble customer to discuss needs and wants within the organization.
- The group will discuss which tools and programs should be connected to Arc.
- Trimble’s AI skills team will then create or guide the customer on creating their own MCPs that allow Arc connection.
- Finally, the AI skills team will create Arc skills for that customer to use that help them accomplish the task that they discussed at the beginning of the process.
The customer then gets “to use these and start testing it out,” Liss said. “Then, basically, we do a review after four weeks on what's working and what their next use cases would look like.”
A demo for using Arc for transportation management
Liss gave FleetOwner a demonstration of Arc to better understand the concept.
Upon first signing in to the system, Arc offers a short tutorial. Every first-time user will have the opportunity to read or skip through these prompts. Users can first start by updating their profile settings. Liss’s profile indicated her name, her job title, and a detailed description of her job functions to help provide “context” for its answers, she said.
This context is essential “so it knows how to answer when I am chatting with it. It can give me customized answers based on what it knows I do,” Liss explained.
The homescreen of the dashboard looks similar to ChatGPT with a task bar on the left side and a search bar in the center. This is where users can type any query into the system they like. They can even toggle through and include connected systems in the search so their questions are answered faster and with more detail.
The Arc dashboard also shows which applications and systems are connected with it. Most Trimble products are currently available with Arc, such as the TMW Suite, TMT Fleet Maintenance, and more, and Liss said the goal is to eventually have all Trimble transportation products available to integrate with the AI agent.
While many fleet management products already include MCPs and APIs that can connect to the Arc system, Trimble anticipates Arc will be able to connect to most third-party transportation products in the future.
Additionally, Arc provides notifications for its users, such as “Prepare for your upcoming meeting,” “This query has been answered,” and more.
Liss has created an Arc skill that enables it to “read my Gemini meeting transcripts every day and provides me a summary of what action items I might have picked up, whether I was in the meeting or not.”
Liss also noted her colleague, Jonah McIntire, chief product and technology officer, transportation and logistics at Trimble, created an Arc skill that provides a notification each time he receives an email from a list of specific people. This personal assistant skill he’s created will also automatically reply to emails for him or place them in order from top priority to those that are less urgent.
The skills opportunities for Arc are endless. Trimble has a team of roughly 1,000 employees that use Arc daily. Within just the past two months, that team has created more than 3,000 Arc skills. “So you can imagine that's a pretty wide range of skills that have been created,” Liss said.
Fleet leaders can also use Arc to view data points and reports and extract specific information or actionable insights from them. Arc can also automatically generate a maintenance ticket if a driver experiences a flat tire or another maintenance concern while out on the road.
Other examples of Arc capabilities include:
- Data entry (order entry and contract intake): This skill provides an alternative to manual order entry and contract intake by automatically extracting field data and inputting it directly into systems of record. (Available in North America)
- Customer support: Delivers contextual, in-product troubleshooting using product documentation and support knowledge. The skill assists users in creating a support ticket with service systems such as Jira or Salesforce if human intervention is needed.
- Personal assistant: Designed to streamline daily workflows, the Personal Assistant skill consolidates data from emails, calendars, messages, and project management tools into a single, prioritized overview with just a single prompt.
Safety and security come first with Trimble Arc
Trimble didn’t build its own AI model to produce Arc. Instead, it’s powered by large language models (LLMs) that many fleet personnel are already familiar with: Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and others.
“We did not spend our time or energy or resources on building our own LLM; there are ones out there that already do the job quite capably,” Liss explained. “We have contracts with all of those providers, and where we have put our energy is into the Arc Safety Harness, which actually makes Arc safe for enterprise use.”
This means that Arc is embedded with safety checkpoints that run in the background, testing for security parameters of different AI skills before they are spread around the organization.
Trimble’s Arc agent is available today through a subscription. Trimble expects its abilities to expand and grow as customers—and the Trimble team itself—continue to use the program.
About the Author
Jade Brasher
Executive Editor Jade Brasher has covered vocational trucking and fleets since 2018. A graduate of The University of Alabama with a degree in journalism, Jade enjoys telling stories about the people behind the wheel and the intricate processes of the ever-evolving trucking industry.