5G is one of the most anticipated, promoted- and debated- technology advancements in modern history. The industry claims that 5G, along with AI and machine learning will revolutionize connectivity and communications for many business applications. But does 5G play any role in solving the day-to-day challenges for trucking operations? Can 5G make the life of a truck operator any better?
We will dive into a day in the life of a truck driver and sift through the realistic impact that 5G can make in the trucking industry. While some pundits indicate that trucking communications are some 2 years away from adopting 5G technology, a transportation industry expert shed some realistic light on the subject. Dr. Ashim Bose is Chief Data Scientist and Vice President of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Omnitracs, that provides SaaS-based fleet management solutions for the trucking industry.
SUMMARY
- AI has been around a long time, starting in the sixties.
- We have the ability to not only collect telematics data, but also take it above and beyond in terms of different signals.
- As we look to embrace the technology, we have to be priced based on our customer’s needs and make sure this is aligned with customer’s expectations, has a compelling ROI, business value etc.
- A lot of the “computing” that will happen at the edge will happen in the vehicle, but there will be a need to ship more KPIs, more macro metrics etc.
- There’s a lot of risk out there in terms of traffic, driving ability etc. So safety and managing risk is a key driver, whether you’re small or big.
WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING AS AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE EXPERT FOR LAST 15 YEARS WHEN AI ITSELF CAME TO SURFACE JUST SEVERAL YEARS BACK?
AI has been around a long time, starting in the sixties and it has had a few summers and winters along the way. And for those of us who are passionate about leveraging the techniques that AI can provide and solve real world problems, there is no shortage of problems to solve, all the way from planning and scheduling of space observations to optimizing assembly lines in manufacturing plants, to optimizing supply chains, to introducing intelligence into our devices, into our vehicles. If you think about it across multiple decades, AI has slowly but surely been creeping into our daily lives. You think about computer vision, natural language processing, think about Alexa, Siri, et cetera. Think about the intelligence in our photo apps on our phones. AI has crept into our daily lives and it’s because there’s been some really good solid work going on behind the scenes over multiple decades. Some of which is called out by the media, some of it goes on behind the scenes. We go through these cycles of summer and winter and so on, but the hard work continues. We’re seeing that progress manifest itself in our daily lives.
HOW HAS AI CHANGED THE TRUCKING AND TRANSPORTATION INDUSTRY?
Like every other industry, like the rest of our lives, the pandemic has definitely had impacts within our industry as well. We serve a lot of different customers that sit in different industries as well, all the way from food to gas, to automotive parts and so on. So we serve a lot of different industries and as you might expect, the pandemic has impacted certain industries harder. In some industries there’s actually a spike in demand. It’s definitely having an impact across the board. When it comes to transportation, you’re moving goods from point A to point B and in doing so, you’re traversing hotspots, the focus there is on minimizing risks and we are working with our customers, providing COVID related alerts, leveraging publicly available data etc.
That’s been well received by our customers. It helps with their planning. It helps reduce risk. One of the other interesting impacts is when you look at some of the Key Performance Indicators(KPIs), things like fuel efficiency, delays in traffic, critical events, which are heartbreaking, sharp turns, accidents, when you think about these types of metrics, there’s been a positive uptake. Given that there’s less traffic on the roads, our customers have to deal with less craziness on the roadways. KPI like fuel efficiency goes up, KPI like critical events goes down because there’s less volume on the roads and that helps. So it has had multifaceted impacts within the industry at a tactical level, the truck drivers on the road to the supporting staff at the back office, a lot of them are now working from home, like the rest of us which is relatively new to them because within the industry, most people were used to working from an office. So there’s been a push to improve safety and have people work from home as needed. In some ways that’s pushing people to adopt more digital techniques. I would say it’s an accelerator for digital transformation and some of these companies, so really lots of multifaceted impact either the pandemic.
HOW HAS TECHNOLOGY BEEN ABLE TO SOLVE DIFFERENT CHALLENGES IN THE TRANSPORTATION INDUSTRY?
In terms of technology, we can boil it down to hardware and software platforms. When you think about telematics, it’s been around a long time and we specialize in it. That’s an example of technology in the cab that provides connectivity to the back office. It helps lead operators with a lot of the metrics around compliance hours of services and an important metric for the industry- the number of hours drivers spend on the road between breaks and on shifts. There are the other metrics that I mentioned, fuel efficiency, critical events, and many more. Technology is playing a key part in it because it’s allowing our customers, the industry to monitor some of these metrics. But of late, there have been other additions from a hardware perspective, sensors, cameras, on the truck, in the cab and so on.
We have the ability to not only collect telematics data, but also take it above and beyond in terms of other signals from the road ways that can help make our customers more safe, more efficient, more compliant. This is the hardware piece. When you think about software, it’s an enabler to take the data from the cab, from the truck and move it to the back end. It could be a data center, could be in the cloud. That allows us to run our algorithms, planning, scheduling, compliance, safety.
Things like retention, within the trucking industry attrition is a huge problem. Truck drivers have a tough life. They’re on the road quite a bit without a lot of human interaction. Being able to leverage the data that’s being collected, do some predictive analytics, talk about when the driver is more likely to quit, can help. It can help our customers, proactively work with them and prevent that from happening. If they’re a top 10 or top X percent driver, then that can be a huge benefit to the customer. There are a number of cases that technology enables both on the front end and the back end. When it comes to safety, the goal here is to prevent bad things from happening.
Once the bad thing happens then you gotta deal with it. The issue then is to minimize risk, minimize exposure. There are quite a few large claims within the industry that have had to deal with just because of accidents. When they do happen, they can lead to lawsuits. Risk management, risk mitigation is something that technology helps our customers. The first thing is to prevent an accident from happening. And the second thing is if it does happen, then trying to figure out the root cause and go through that process in a more data oriented way is extremely important.
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON 5G REALISTICALLY SOLVING A PROBLEM?
Technology’s only as good as a use case enables from an adoption perspective. When you think about a use case, more often than not the communication, 5G type technologies will interact with other technologies that enable the use case like AI. When you look at it holistically, adoption is influenced by things like user perception. Does the user perceive the value-add to be positive or negative in terms of their daily life? Accuracy, whatever insights that are being provided? Are they really on target or are they off target? And here, the tolerance is important because from a data science perspective, it may be 80% accurate, but it may not be good enough for the customer.
Trust is another one, do the customers do to the drivers, to the back office folks, do they trust in the insights that are being provided through the use case. Real time performance is important. When things are happening on a split second basis, if the insight that’s being provided comes in a few minutes or few hours down the road, then it’s useless. There is a timing element here as well. When you think about 5G in concert with technologies like AI, they enable all of this, they have the ability to handle all of this. We are extremely excited about the impact that 5G could have on things like, the user experience, the real time experiences, the more media rich content that could be provided to our drivers on the road, interacting with one or more devices along with monitoring real time traffic and navigating through it.
There is an to provide more engaging, more real time experiences, both in terms of the driving, the autonomous features that are creeping in as well as when they’re at a stop providing them with perhaps some entertainment options, as well as some coaching like reviewing the drive that they just had and providing some engaging gamified coaching that can help them improve their driving performance to improve the KPIs that they may be being measured against and paid against. It could hit their bottom line as well. These are the types of things, 5G in concert with other technologies can enable. And we are very excited about that, but we have to temper our excitement because there are certain drivers that will dictate the rate of adoption things like, what devices are enabled through 5G, what does the coverage look like through the various providers?
What are some of the integration costs, and in general, total cost of ownership because within the industry, there’s a huge focus on the bottom line, a few dollars one way or the other per asset per truck can make a huge difference. As we look to embrace the technology, we have to be priced based on our customer’s needs and make sure this is aligned with customer’s expectations, has a compelling ROI, business value etc.
In things like what’s the safe distance to be behind the vehicle in front of you, what’s the speed at which you want to take a turn. There are some very tactical things that will come in terms of autonomy and the driver experience before full on autonomy. We definitely see some of these new technologies, AI, 5G, et cetera enabling that. But in the near future, we don’t anticipate having a fully autonomous truck with no humans in it. A human in the loop is going to be critical. What they do in the vehicle is going to change over time as the truck becomes more and more autonomous. It will make the quality of life, efficiency, productivity, et cetera even better as the human in the loop is now allowed to do more value added functions in terms of the plan, the schedule etc. That’s the way we are looking at it. These are really important strategic problems in the industry that we are dealing with on a day to day basis and working with the OEMs who are also doing a fair amount in this space. Lots to come in the future for sure.
WHAT IS 5G GOING TO ENABLE THAT YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO DO TODAY WITHOUT 5G?
It’s more about just improved bandwidth capacity and being able to send and receive more data per second. Telemetric has been around for a while, 4G has been around for a while but think about the explosion in the data at every point in the ecosystem, including the vehicle. You have a lot more sensors, you have a lot more cameras.
A lot of the “computing” that will happen at the edge will happen in the vehicle, but there will be a need to ship more KPIs, more macro metrics and so on back to the back office to the cloud, to the data center, et cetera, for some of the insights and machine learning models to run on the back end as well.
That’s one aspect. The other aspect is the media rich content that we’re consuming. It’s almost like no matter how fat the pie, the media content it figures out a way to chew that up. A few years ago, we had much thinner broadband connections at home. And we thought life was good, but low and behold, with all the video games and media content that my kids are consuming, no matter what I upgrade to, I still seem to have a problem in terms of the bandwidth. So those are the type of factors that will kick in and will drive some of the adoption assuming we’re able to solve for at the right price point.
WHAT DO YOU THINK ARE THE REAL CHALLENGES FOR THE TRUCK DRIVERS THAT NEED TO BE SOLVED?
There are certain challenges that have been there for a while. I think the nuances have changed but a lot of the core challenges remain. When you look at the industry, there’s a spread. There’s a spectrum from the mom-and-pop type operators, family-owned operators to very large providers that have very large fleet, thousands of trucks operating in multiple industry segments and so on. The challenges to a certain extent vary by subsegment, but there are some common themes. Safety is a big one. There’s a lot of risk out there in terms of traffic, driving ability etc. So safety and managing risk is a key driver, whether you’re small or big no matter what. Fleet efficiency, miles per gallon are extremely important. Most of the trucks have fairly low miles per gallon in general if you compare it to passenger cars.
That makes sense because they are a lot bigger and carry a lot more weight. Even a small swing by percent in miles per year can have a huge impact to the bottom line. I had mentioned retention which meant retaining the top drivers and making sure that they’re motivated. They feel taken care of and that they have the right care and feeding on an ongoing basis is extremely important. While it’s a highly technology enabled industry, when you really boil it down to what are the pain points, a lot of times they’re more human related, they’re more business related and technology can help alleviate some others and improve these metrics and improve the quality of life for our customers, which at the end of the day helps them operate their business in a more effective way.
WHAT WOULD YOU ASK THE 5G INDUSTRY LEADERS FROM THE TRUCKING INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE?
Technologies like 5G, I would say the industry is more consumer, where it makes sense in providing richer user experiences, improved use cases to our customers. When it comes to requests of the 5G industry, it comes down to an ease of integration, the coverage if it’s body coverage, then you gotta wonder, what’s the point especially in an industry where you’re always on the move, and you can go from really good coverage to really bad coverage pretty quickly. The cost of adoption, to me, are the primary drivers. The easier the industry can make it for us to consume at the right price point, that helps.
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON THE OPINION THAT SOME ANALYSTS BELIEVE TRUCKING INDUSTRY IS 2 YEARS AWAY FROM ADOPTING 5G?
That is the beginning of the adoption curve. As you know adoption is not a bullion event, like yesterday industry didn’t have it and today everybody has it. I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’ll start to get there, but like anything on a curve, if there is a time element there as well, then we have to be realistic about that.
The final verdict from the expert is that 5G along with AI will be a key enabler in improving the trucking operations and the life of a truck driver. But the adoption code will realistically start in a couple of years.
