Ford has revealed a new AI fleet management system for its commercial vehicle business.
The U.S. automaker introduced Ford Pro AI at the Work Truck Week show in Indianapolis this week. It is available now to the company’s U.S.-based Pro telematics subscribers.
The tech delivers the capability to analyze more than a billion data points daily from connected CVs — covering elements such as fuel consumption, engine health, route optimization, and even whether occupants are wearing seatbelts — and turn them into insights that fleet managers can act on.
With Ford thought to have more than 840,000 paid subscribers globally, the company hopes the AI tool can ramp up profits for the Pro CV division, which last year reported revenue of more than $66 billion, assisted by a 30% rise in software subscriptions.
Ford says Pro AI offers customers added value by boosting the efficiency of their fleets and reducing downtime on the road.
“This isn’t AI for AI’s sake. You can’t simulate Ford’s 120-plus years of commercial vehicle experience and customer understanding,” Kevin Dunbar, Ford senior vice president, said in a release. “We build on that deep expertise and blend it with a robust data fabric enhanced with proprietary data and leverage large language models [LLMs] in a way that respects the realities of a modern fleet.”
The company’s own research suggests fleet managers spend more than 23 hours a week handling routine tasks, such as scheduling services and tracking costs, and that AI can help reduce this workload by about 40 %each week.
Ford provided examples of how the tech, built on Google Cloud and using a number of LLMs, uses Ford’s data to deliver results.
It cited, for example, an imaginary fleet manager for a plumbing company querying how many of its 25 vehicles require a service in a given month. After inputting this question into Pro AI, Ford says it “quickly responds with a list of vehicles in [the] fleet that need service based on their vehicle health data”.
The comprehensive answers go deeper than would be provided by a chatbot, according to Ford, offering a detailed analysis of the vehicles’ diagnostics — providing the information required for a fleet manager to decide which vehicles need servicing first — and can also navigate to Ford’s Pro Telematics Software, enabling customers to book maintenance.
The tool is available at no additional cost to Pro Telematics customers at launch in the U.S., with Europe and Canada among other markets Ford is assessing for future rollout.