Motive Unveils AI Agents to Help Fleets Prevent Costly Problems

Motive launches AI Agents as fleets weigh how to prevent problems

Motive launched a new set of AI Agents Monday at the American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference & Exhibition in Charlotte, North Carolina. The tools are designed to act on safety and maintenance alerts according to rules set by each fleet, rather than simply displaying another notification for a manager to review.

Depending on the workflow, an Agent can contact a driver, open a maintenance work order, notify a manager or escalate an issue to multiple teams. Motive said the Agents are available now to its customers and are intended to help fleets handle routine follow-up without adding administrative staff.

The launch comes as carriers face a growing volume of data from telematics, cameras, electronic logging devices and maintenance systems. The information can help identify fatigue, vehicle defects, idling and weather risks, but acting on every alert still generally falls to safety, maintenance and operations employees.

“Our customers don’t need another alert. They need action,” Hemant Banavar, Motive’s chief product officer, said in a company release.

For drivers, the technology could mean earlier warnings about hours-of-service limits, fatigue concerns, severe weather or vehicle problems. It also raises a practical question for fleets: how much authority should software have to contact drivers or make operational decisions without a manager reviewing each event?

Turning alerts into assigned actions

Motive said fleets can select a trigger and response through guided workflows or prebuilt templates. No technical expertise is required, according to the company. A fleet sets the threshold and desired action, and the Agent applies the rule continuously.

Available templates cover areas including idling, fault codes and fatigue. One Agent can combine multiple triggers and actions, Motive said in a company blog post.

For example, when a fault code meets a fleet’s criteria, an Agent can open a work order in Motive Maintenance and place the vehicle out of service. Motive said the system also provides an AI-generated explanation of the fault, a severity rating and recommended actions.

Other workflows can send an in-cab message when a driver is approaching a fatigue or hours-of-service threshold. An idling Agent can prompt a driver to shut off the engine after a set period and alert a manager if the idling continues. Weather Agents can warn drivers about storms along active routes.

The company said collision rates can rise by as much as 40% during winter months, based on Motive data. It also cited a figure that 47% of fleets have experienced a delayed maintenance issue leading to a breakdown or an out-of-service event.

Those risks are tied to existing carrier responsibilities. Federal regulations prohibit a motor carrier from requiring or allowing a fatigued driver to operate a commercial vehicle under 49 CFR 392.3. Under 49 CFR 396.7, carriers also may not operate vehicles in a condition likely to cause an accident or breakdown.

Automating the first response does not remove those responsibilities from the carrier or its employees. Instead, the system is intended to shorten the time between identifying a problem and assigning someone to address it.

Some fleets are starting with office alerts

Bennett Family of Companies began using Agents before the public launch. Jared Whitson, the company’s senior director of safety and compliance, said Bennett initially configured Agents to notify employees rather than contact drivers.

One workflow alerts asset management, the shop and safety personnel when a company truck with a critical fault code enters the company’s McDonough, Georgia, headquarters geofence. Another notifies Whitson when a driver records three critical telematics events within 24 hours.

Whitson said the limited approach was intentional. Bennett wants to build confidence in the system before allowing it to communicate directly with drivers through in-cab technology.

“I wanna build the trust in the product,” Whitson said during a Motive fireside chat at MCE.

He added that each company will have to determine how far it wants Agents to act on its behalf. For Bennett, starting with back-office notifications allows employees to evaluate the alerts and responses before expanding the system’s role.

Early customer examples

Motive said companies including Carvana, NovaSource Power, SPATCO Energy Services, Bennett Family of Companies and Bulk Environmental & Industrial are building or deploying Agents.

In one example, a moving and storage company operating about 230 vehicles is using 15 Agents across its safety program. One Agent identifies patterns such as repeated speeding, unsafe lane changes and drowsiness over a rolling five-day period, then notifies the driver and coach when a threshold is reached. Other workflows escalate crashes and near-misses to management.

The company estimates the system has reduced manual event-review work by 20 hours per week.

A 35-truck fencing and guardrail contractor configured an hours-of-service Agent to provide an in-cab voice message when a driver is 60 minutes from the company’s limit. A second alert goes to the driver and coach at 30 minutes. The built-in buffer is intended to give drivers time to find parking and stop legally.

Motive said the contractor’s monthly violations fell from about 85 to 10 in September, an approximately 88% reduction. The company also said most drivers correct the issue after the first message, limiting the number of alerts managers must handle.

What is available now

Current Agents can notify managers by email, text message or app notification and can reach drivers through in-cab voice messages. Calls to drivers from Atlas, Motive’s AI assistant, through AI Dashcam Plus are expected later this year.

Motive said plain-language Agent creation and goal-setting features, such as setting a target for fewer collisions, are planned for early next year. A library of prebuilt Agents covering areas such as coaching and maintenance is available now.

The company said Agents are included in existing Motive plans, while certain premium actions are offered as add-ons. Motive did not provide pricing in its announcement.

The product launch follows Motive’s announcement about six weeks earlier that it had raised more than $1.3 billion from General Catalyst and withdrawn its initial public offering filing. The company said annual recurring revenue had surpassed $600 million across nearly 100,000 customers.

For fleets and drivers, the main change is not the creation of another alert system. It is the attempt to connect alerts to a predefined response. Whether that response begins with a manager’s review or reaches a driver directly will remain a fleet-by-fleet decision.