Before the pandemic changed so much of our world, we looked ahead to 2025. The middle of this decade was supposed to be when we started seeing emerging 21st-century technology take over transportation: We were told last decade that driverless freight movement, electric trucks, artificial intelligence, and machine learning would be prevalent throughout North American supply chains by now.
It was, of course, a lot easier to envision this futuristic world of zero-emission and automated transport when 2025 felt so far away. But here it is, breathing down our necks as the trucking and transportation industries close out another trying, post-pandemic year.
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The 2020 pandemic didn’t so much to slow technology adoption as it reshuffled the industry: It boosted e-commerce, last-mile delivery, and trucking-as-a-service operations, but the freight boom that followed led to the prolonged freight recession that has hampered fleets across North America. This led to tighter carrier profit margins and more cautious spending on new equipment and technology.
We aren’t as far into the future as we thought, hoped—or maybe feared—we would be at the end of the previous decade. There are just hundreds of electric heavy-duty trucks operating over the road. Humans are still behind the wheels of all Class 8 trucks operating on public roadways.
But these sluggish months reminded us how working smarter can give you a leg up on hard-working competitors. As more fleets get their hands on new equipment in 2025, a lot are going to be amazed at how much safer and efficient their fleets could become.
Our industry is safer today as engineers have fine-tuned last decade’s advanced driver assistance systems. Technology is also making equipment more efficient. While battery-electric deployment hasn’t reached the lofty visions of early developers, diesel trucks burn less fuel and emit less emissions today than at any time in history. And AI and machine learning are helping fleets make more informed decisions within an industry that, at its root, is about getting things from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are helping us decipher vast amounts of data quickly, but machines haven’t replaced humans yet. These technologies are assisting humans to be better at trucking.
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“One of the things we all like about trucking is that it is pretty simple—the basics haven’t changed that much,” Rusty Kirby, senior director of transportation for Pilot Flying J, said this fall. “You still need a qualified driver to transport material safely and efficiently over and over again. What’s changed is our ability to optimize that very basic activity for us.”
Kirby said that technology advancements this decade are improving logistics through communications. During American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference & Exhibition, he described how complicated the simple task of hauling fuel is for fleets like his, which service more than 850 truck stops in North America.
Each day, his team faces intricate decisions about where it can pick up fuel, where it needs to go, and how to get there. And those things change quicker than a human can keep up. “All that creates a lot of complexity,” he said. AI can improve those fleet operations “to really communicate and get that back-and-forth with the driver instantly to scale at a speed you could not do with a traditional means of communication.”
Using advanced telematics technology that ties in shipping documents, asset locations, fuel needs, driver data, and more, Pilot can better manage its transportation network and, thus, better serve its customers. But it’s still dominated by people.
“Telematics information we get from the tractor is a huge volume of data,” Kirby noted. “It’s all incredibly useful. But it takes a large team of folks to manage that data, to figure out how you can get the most out of it.”
While we wait for the robots to take over, 2025 could be the year you raise your trucking AIQ—artificial intelligence quotient—while keeping humanity in the business that drives the U.S. economy.
So, while robots aren’t driving yet, automation and artificial intelligence are making it more efficient—with the help of humans.
