Motive, an AI-powered integrated operations platform, recently unveiled AI Answers, the first conversational AI specifically designed for physical operations. The technology allows teams to instantly access insights from operational data by asking questions in natural language, similar to ChatGPT but specifically tailored to fleet operations data.

The company notes this is the first conversational artificial intelligence designed specifically for physical operations. AI Answers builds upon Motive’s analytics platform launched earlier this year, as technology providers focus on features like conversational queries rather than complex data analysis.

The new tool allows fleet managers to ask natural language questions such as “Which routes were least fuel-efficient last week?” and receive immediate visual answers. Motive notes early testing shows that the system significantly reduces reporting time, with tasks that previously took hours now completing in minutes.

“We’re seeing customers dive even deeper and pull in questions that maybe would only have required an analyst to answer,” said Emily Parsons, senior product manager at Motive, in an interview with FreightWaves. Instead of needing an analyst to create a formula or adjust technical calculations, this AI assistant is part of a larger trend of data democratization, giving end users more options than what used to be gatekept by a data science team.

One important ingredient in an AI model is the data it uses to create the model. “Our models have all of the context of specifically our physical operations and our data, so they’re not going to be pulling across the board — they’re going to have really targeted answers just for our customers,” Parsons explained.

Another important feature is scalability and granularity. “You can dive into anything from that high-level trend to a specific event,” Parsons said. “Being able to pinpoint ‘I want to look at what happened at this time, even at this specific lat/long for this vehicle,’ you’re able to do that in seconds within AI Answers.”

This capability proves particularly valuable for safety and compliance teams tracking issues like equipment disconnections or unusual patterns. As one example, users can query: “I want to pull a history of drivers who have [ELD] disconnects over the past week and find their lat/long and if there’s any commonality based on location.”

While AI Answers currently focuses on analytics and reporting, Motive positions it as just the first step in a broader artificial intelligence strategy. The company began building AI capabilities in 2017 to improve driver safety and has steadily expanded its AI applications.

“AI Answers is Motive’s next step in building the most complete integrated AI platform, but it’s just the first step,” Parsons noted. “The future state of this is really going across the entire Motive ecosystem.”

For customers previously forced to push Motive data through external tools like Snowflake and Power BI, AI Answers eliminates these extra steps by enabling the same reporting capabilities directly within the Motive platform. The current version allows users to save and pin visualizations to dashboards and export findings to share with team members, with conversation history features planned for future updates.