Ford Pro AI Assistant Promises Intuitive Problem Solving, Task Automation for Commercial Fleet Managers

Ford Pro, the commercial fleet and telematics subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company, has announced Ford Pro AI, an intelligent assistant designed to simplify fleet management and give owners quick, actionable insights based on millions of data points generated by vehicles in use. The new offering was announced at CES in January, and officially debuted at the Work Truck Week commercial vehicle convention in Indianapolis this week.

All existing Ford Pro Telematics Software subscribers in the US will get access to Ford Pro AI at no extra cost. The company says it is evaluating launches in other territories including Canada and Europe for a future rollout.

Businesses that operate large fleets of Ford vehicles will be able to see vehicle data and activity summaries on demand, automate repetitive tasks, and speed up common operations. Users can ask the AI tool in plain language and get answers immediately, reducing the need to refer to dashboards or manually filter and pull data from reports to analyse.

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A fleet manager will be able to see which vehicles need servicing on priority based on specific diagnostics, book appointments at authorised service centres, or schedule an on-site visit by a technician. Data points include vehicle health and maintenance, utilisation rates, trip history, driver behaviour, etc.

Ford Pro AI is aimed at reducing vehicle downtime as well as freeing human managers to focus on operational tasks while routine tasks are automated. It can also help with tracking fuel consumption and other costs, for example it can analyse and correlate vehicle and fuel use, refuelling logs and receipts, idle times, speeding, and acceleration across every individual vehicle and driver, to identify patterns. Recommendations to optimise drivers’ routines and costs will thus be specific to each customer and their use cases.

The tool can even draft emails recommending specific steps for these vehicles and drivers to help reduce fuel costs and downtime. However, the company recommends that all output should be reviewed by a human, using operational judgment and ensuring conformity to existing processes. Responses to chat requests will include context about what data was used to generate them.

Ford commercial vehicles have their own Internet access, and can report accurate real-time data to the Ford Pro AI system. The new AI assistant works alongside existing capabilities including asset tracking and dashcam logging.