ccj's 1044 is brought to you by Chevron DEL heavyduty diesel engine oil now there's even more reasons to choose Del artificial intelligence has come a long way in trucking to help improve efficiencies how much more can it help you're watching ccj's 1044 a weekly episode that brings you the latest Trucking industry news and updates from the editors of ccj don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell for notifications so you'll never miss an installment of 1044 hey everybody welcome back I'm Jason C
anon and my co-host on the other side is Matt Cole AI is not a new idea in trucking it's been around for more than a decade and over that time its capabilities have only grown AI is used in trucking to help improve safety efficiency performance and more by helping people do their jobs better in many cases joining us this week is yav Amil Chief Information officer at rxo who talks about the advancements in AI within Trucking and where it might eventually lead rxo is an asset light Transportation
Company and as a Technology Group uh we we build all the Technologies uh that help the business uh grow over time one of our biggest platforms that we have to drive transportation is called rxo connect and this platform in many ways sits on top of all the lines of business that we are serving brokerage at the front we have managed Transportation Last Mile and Freight forwarding now this platform was built from the ground up meaning that we had the luxury of building things in a microservices app
roach allowing us to to build this Innovation and I know that today we're going to focus a lot around Ai and machine learning and I think in that on that front and we've been practicing AI for more than a decade now um this is not new to us but of course as as as more the more you know AI is evolving over time H we are progressing with that and and making sure that we take advantage of of all the new capabilities that are available for us a lot of times when people think about Ai and automation
they think it's a threat to their job but yov says it really should be viewed as a supplement to help us do our jobs more efficiently AI is you know it's a science of making machines do things that would require a let's call it a humanlike intelligence there are a lot of areas techniques within the AI you know think about machine learning deep learning neural networks a lot of progress is happening there but it's important to know that it's not to replace the human intelligence in many ways it t
o amplify our creativity and ability to complete task and I look at it more of a augmented intelligence for us to be able to be much more be better and be able to spend our time in the most important task that we need to do rxo recently launched an aid driven system of its own to streamline the check-in process for trucks at warehouses and distribution centers yov tells us how it works after a word from 1044 sponsor Chevron lubricants these past few years have been less than easy we've encounter
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sake of technology and we make sure that you know we it ties to either you know productivity or volume or margins overall in this case this is a productivity type of an initiative and we saw that you know in our big warehouses and yards there is a you know a gate slowdowns when trucks are coming in so we we combine the already video that are coming from the gate the CCTV that we have there and apply the machine learning and AI capabilities to be able to extract the information of the truck and
help the person at the gate to be more effective instead of you know going to the truck and writing down you know the number of the truck and the driver details on the piece of paper going to the computer and typing that in that actually allowed that person to be much more effective and the moment a truck is coming and there is already an appointment in the system it extracts the relevant information able to match it to that appointment and make the whole process of checking in and getting into
the yard much much more efficient and know from our measurement on an average they reduced about 30% of the weight time at the gate and we get a lot of positive reactions for both of course you know the carriers and and the you know operations at the gate and we don't want to stop there there are a lot of opportunities to even get efficiencies within the yard leveraging drones and being able to understand what is going on instead of having a human trying to go through that and of course when a h
uman is involved you know sometimes we make errors and the moment you make an error that creates a more delays or challenges for the process so leveraging these type of techniques not just reducing the weight time it reduces the error rate as well Ai and trucking has evolved considerably over the last decade and yop says there are still a lot of gains to be made you know it started in the past by you know object recognition image recognition then it evolved into insights and and and system that
came with recommendation like matching loads with carriers and today in today's world I'm excited about the you know things that like task completion I can just you know talk to you like let's talk about like a futuristic state where you know a carrier can talk to a machine or type or whatever interface they want to interact with the machine and say you know book me a loads for this week um you know I want to leave my facility Monday morning and I want to Res return by Friday 5:00 p.m I don't kn
ow maybe there is a you know a birthday in the family or I want just to be there for for dinner and I want to spend one night in Chicago and now you know just do it for me and the system will automatically find maybe multiple loads that can fit that these requirements and of course you know the the truck type and their certification that this specific driver have and minimize the empty miles and maximize the revenue for the driver and the driver does not or the carrier does not need to do anythi
ng the system will automatically book the load sign it to them and that like this is the the greatness that's a the way I look at you know Ai and machine learning it's a it's a win-win type of a thing because everybody gets something out of it and we could focus most of our time in the things that we bring value as human beings to to the surface YF says the biggest benefits Trucking has seen as a result of AI are the efficiencies gained from automation load matching and more drilling down into t
he transportation industry I think there are a lot of benefits of course the first thing that comes to mine and the example that we just gave with the yard is the efficiency and automation but that you know there are lot of areas in the transportation industry like load matching which you know I refer to finding the right loads for the right carriers route optimization even Warehouse workforce planning and even document processing in today's large language models you could extract information fr
om documents even if the document is not structured uh we actually using that at rxo as well when a shipper is asking us for a quote via email in an unstructured format we using technology to be able to extract the request and even automatically send a quote to that shaper so that's that's around automation another benefit is of course you know it it drives cost reduction you know fuel time on task resource planning as I mentioned if you talk about warehouses you don't want to find yourself that
you have more Workforce than what you really need to so the moment you plan right you you could save a lot of cost the other benefit around Ai and machine learning is around decision making and I touched that a little bit earlier that ability of a process to analyze massive massive data sets I'm not saying a human being cannot do that but that will take a long time and helping that a person to make a data driven decision that's a huge benefit of leveraging these machines you know overall from c
ustomer service if you think about personal ization the systems today are personalized one user that logs into a system sees a different flavor of the system according to their behavior past Behavior or attributes or preferences and the ability to provide you know a 247 support you know today the the Gen is a is a big hype today and and these Bots that can help you with task completion and provide a selfservice 247 self-service capabilities this is a huge huge benefit that we gain from this type
of engine while there are plenty of benefits to useing AI there are also drawbacks that include security over Reliance and a lot more the drawbacks are very I would say similar to any other area but I can call out a few so of course the first one is around security the moment you have ai engines and machine learning you have a lot of data um concentrated in one place and then you could start having areas of data privacy and overall you know Bad actors that may be trying to misuse this informati
on in addition what we see today that the Bad actors are becoming more sophisticated they themselves are leveraging Ai and machine learning uh to try and trick the user in order to gain access to specific areas so we need to be smarter and smarter over time to make sure that from security perspective and privacy perspective H we are protecting ourselves and protecting the data an area of AI which it's a concern or or area we need to pay attention to is the fairness of AI or the bias that could b
e embedded within the data a lot of engines rely on the data on the internet and the data Internet could be biased and AI you know the data you feed the engine they learn from that and they could actually build biased within their recommendation so we need to build mechanism and I know maybe it's funny to mention that it could be a machine learning mechanism that looks at the results of the AI engine and flag areas where things seems biased towards one specific group or one specific type of acti
ons there is another area where it's I I mentioned that around explainability in today's world we create that dependency uh on machines so one of course we need to make sure that we have the processes and mechanisms to be able to proceed even if from some reason the computer or the system stopped and you think about you know autonomous trucks and areas like that what happens if if if the computer from some reason is not functioning you need the ability to know how to drive the car or to take con
trol from remote and be able to address the situation by maybe stopping on the sidelines or doing anything like that but going to the the black box type of approach is that you know we we create that dependency from you know whatever the system recommend us or Surface to us we consider that as probably the best thing or we consider that as the truth and in in today there is a an effort to build explainable AI it's called X AI where the engines bring together with the results they provide the rea
soning behind it so you could say oh you recommend this thing but these are the reason why because you did that in the past because you know other let's say carriers like you optimized for this specific route having that explainability will allow us not just to understand what is going on H but even to be able to flag any any things that is not necessarily relying on the right information like it has over the last decade a will continue to grow over the next decade and Beyond what will that look
like in trucking first of course there are use cases that we are not even aware of and we cannot even dream of but the thing that we could see in front of us I would say one is autonomous trucks and autonomous self-driving uh trucks and vehicles and even flying vehicles you could think about drones delivering packages or even taking passengers on a vertical liftoff and and landing in addition of course there is what is referred to as the connected infrastructure the moment we'll get to a point
that all the things let's say driving on the road will be connected together if you think about even traffic lights and and all the indications that are coming uh from the roads themselves you could build a much more efficient Transportation platform where Vehicles will drive on this infrastructure in a much smoother way and allow the decision making and dynamic dally adjusting you know thinking about you know traffic lights or anything like that you could dynamically adjust that to the the truc
ks or vehicles on the road and minimize even accidents from safety perspective connected infrastructure will have a huge huge impact on the Transportation uh overall from safety perspective you know I mentioned a little bit about the connected infrastructure but uh you could think about the inside the vehicle as well uh you know theu drivers or drunk drivers even monitoring the vehicle Health being able to understand that something is about to break and make sure that you provide enough time for
alerts so you could even predict maintenance that could save money and make sure that we are you know all all the vehicles on the road are in a safe State again minimizing any any accidents or unplanned type of uh activities that's it for this week's 1044 you can read more on ccj digital.com while you're there sign up for our newsletter and stay up to dat on the latest in trucking industry news and Trends if you have any questions or feedback please let us know in the comments below don't forge
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