ABM Q4 - Flipbook - Page 64
OPI N I O N
FLEET
When did visibility
stop being enough?
→ Will Gill is chief product officer, International Payments Division at Corpay
F
or years, one of the main
promises of fleet technology
was visibility. Give fleet
managers better information
about their vehicles, drivers,
fuel, charging and costs and
they would be better equipped
to run the fleet. But we are
reaching the limits of visibility
as an ambition in itself.
The environment fleet managers
operate in has become much more
complicated. Take electrification –
the transition is increasingly uneven,
with different vehicle types, charging
environments and business use cases
moving at different speeds. There are
also pressures around infrastructure,
vehicle costs and residual values.
For the fleet manager, those issues sit
alongside the existing job of controlling
costs, managing drivers, keeping vehicles
moving and answering questions from
the wider business. Simply making more
information visible does not necessarily
make any of those decisions easier.
The next step
I have spent much of my career working
on products where large amounts of
information have to become useful
to somebody doing something in the
real world. That was true in mapping
and navigation at Nokia and HERE
Technologies, and it was true when I
moved into connected EV charging at
Plugsurfing. The lesson is: data becomes
valuable when it reduces the distance
between a problem and a decision.
Imagine a fleet manager can see
that the refuelling cost of a group of
vehicles has increased. Visibility has done
its job, the numbers are there, but the
questions that matter come next: What
changed? Is it temporary or part of a
pattern? Which vehicles need attention?
Is there something the fleet manager
should do today? If answering those
questions still means opening several
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AUTOMOTIVE BUSINESS
Q4 2026
reports and spending half an hour
comparing numbers, we have digitised
the information without necessarily
improving the decision-making process.
Fleet technology has an opportunity
to become much more useful. Rather
than expecting somebody to inspect
everything, it can help identify the
exceptions, patterns and changes that
deserve attention. Instead of another
number, it can provide context. Rather
than making the fleet manager search
for the question, it can help them get
closer to the answer.
A higher bar
That shift sounds straightforward, but
it asks much more of product teams.
Once tech moves from reporting towards
interpretation and recommendation,
getting the answer right matters more.
The user must understand why
something has been highlighted, what
information sits behind it, and whether
the suggested action makes sense in
their context. Technology can provide the
intelligence, but the fleet manager still
brings experience and judgement that a
system cannot simply assume.
I do not think the future of fleet
technology should be judged by how
many decisions it can automate. A better
measure is how many decisions it can
make easier.
The underlying technology is becoming
more capable, particularly as AI makes
it easier to analyse information, identify
patterns and interact with complex
datasets. But capability should not
determine the product, the customer
problem should. Start with the decision
the fleet manager is trying to make, work
out what information would genuinely
help them make it, then decide what tech
belongs between those two points.
Fleet technology has become very good
at showing people what happened. The
more interesting challenge now is helping
them understand what matters next.
