Everyone thinks autonomous trucking is about deleting the driver — but that's the easy part. Over on my podcast The Fleet, I sat down with Nick Elder of Torc Robotics to unpack what actually has to be true before fleets can run driverless Class 8 trucks at scale: a fundamentally different safety architecture, and all the work a driver does that has nothing to do with steering.
Your service vehicle is probably built around assumptions that stopped being true years ago. On this episode of The Fleet, Siemens' Adam Orth explains how his team went into the field, found vans "hauling air," and rethought the whole fleet around the work itself — moving techs from vans into SUVs and killing cookie-cutter upfits along the way.
Think cutting fleet costs saves money? Jennifer Pemberton keeps 3,500 vehicles on the road for Alsco Uniforms with a two-person team — and she'll tell you the cheapest call today is usually the most expensive one down the road. We got into maintenance, dash cams, idling, and where EVs actually pay off, over on my podcast The Fleet.
The cheapest decision today can be the most expensive one tomorrow. On my latest episode of The Fleet, TMC's Robert Braswell — 33 years at the neutral technical seat of trucking — breaks down what fleets are really betting on for 2027, and where cost-cutting quietly backfires.
Network automation has been "coming soon" for over a decade — so what's actually different this time? Over on my IT Visionaries channel I talk with John Capobianco of Itential, who built a CCIE-level AI agent that configures routers, reads packet captures, and runs compliance tests through plain English in Slack.
A look back at the biggest ideas from The Fleet — where mobility, infrastructure, data, and the driver experience all start becoming one connected system. I pulled the sharpest moments from the show into a single episode; here's what the people actually building modern fleet keep coming back to.
"Just tell the AI not to delete the database" — if only it were that easy. I sat down with Camunda CTO Daniel Meyer over on my IT Visionaries channel to dig into why prompts alone can't govern AI agents, and what governing by structure instead of instruction actually looks like.
Every product you ship rides on thousands of tiny procurement decisions — and most companies are still making them in stale spreadsheets. Over on my IT Visionaries channel, Veritos.AI cofounder Shardul Shah explains how real-time supply chain intelligence turns procurement from reactive firefighting into a genuine strategic advantage.
Sometimes the smartest freight route is A to C to B. On The Fleet, ASU industrial engineer Lacy Greening breaks down the hidden math of the middle mile — why networks make moves that look wrong until you see the numbers, how locally smart decisions create network-wide problems, and where AI actually helps (and where it doesn't).
Fleet moves your mail, your produce, your workforce — and most people have no idea how big the industry actually is. On The Fleet, Black Fleet Network founder Zā Farley makes the case that network is a verb, not a title, and that the fleet leaders growing are the ones refusing to "dinosaur" themselves out.
A practical playbook from The Fleet: BD's Jennifer VrMeer on keeping drivers moving while the business changes around them — acquisitions, divestitures, vendor consolidation, and the hidden cost of staying too long with the wrong fleet management company. If you've ever had to keep a fleet running through chaos, this one's for you.
The biggest lever in fleet management isn't the tech, the policy, or the vendor. On The Fleet, UCB's Michael Acosta — who runs 1,300+ vehicles across four countries with a two-person team — makes the case that it's driver buy-in, and shares the anonymous message board that revealed what no survey ever could.
4 people. 18,000 vehicles. No blown engines. On The Fleet, Rollins Fleet Director Charles Schott — who's run 30,000+ vehicles across 70 countries at Pfizer and armored fleets at Brinks — breaks down how a tiny team runs one of North America's largest service fleets on a single operating principle: FLOW.
Installing cameras made incident rates go UP — and that's exactly what you want. On The Fleet, Element's Brian Kinniry explains why fleet safety is shifting from "train after the crash" to catching risk before it happens, how nuclear verdicts turned your safety data into legal evidence, and how one training module cut preventable incidents 35%.
A future-facing one from The Fleet: futurist Colin Dhillon (ImagineQ, advisor to NuPort Robotics) on how Physical AI — neural networks plus autonomous systems — is reshaping fleet economics faster than most leaders realize. Lights-out factories, disappearing truck cabins, and why the last human job is placing a safety cone.
