A major challenge the leasing industry constantly contends with is that vehicle and status information is stored in a myriad of different internal and vendor systems. It should come as no surprise that the holy grail of leasing has always been to have a single system that remains always up to date, reconciling information across the entire vehicle lifecycle.
The Quest for Unification
Many have undertaken the quest to unify data to varying degrees of success. Most have found, often painfully, that this dream meets some very difficult realities. The information that’s critical to understanding where a new vehicle is during onboarding may be trapped somewhere within a transport company’s internal systems. Or locked away in a spreadsheet maintained by an upfitter — only to be shared periodically with the FMC.
Making matters worse, information unification systems that promised to integrate all information regardless of where it is located broke down when it hit smaller vendors. These smaller venders have no advanced systems and certainly no APIs to integrate with. At nearly every FMC there’s a team of people with the responsibility to cut and paste information between one system and another, so that once a week—a fleeting moment really—there’s temporarily a reconciled view of most of the required information in a master Google sheet. And after this moment of quasi clarity, the cycle must begin again. Sisyphus had it easy.
Yet there is hope. This is all changing right now with the advent of AI and the very real and helpful applications it has for the fleet and leasing industry. AI can accelerate the integration of previously disconnected systems and keep everything up to date through the use of three relatively new technologies.
1. Computer Use AI
Many vendors keep vehicle information in website portals where FMCs must log in to check on the status of vehicles. In the past there’s not been an easy way to automate logging in and running reports, let alone having that information automatically populate in their own internal system. Thankfully, this now can be in the past. Now, in the same way you can ask an AI such as ChatGPT or Gemini to answer a question for you, you can task AI to “log in and find all vehicles that are ready to be delivered today.” And the AI would be able to understand where and how to log in to the required portals, make the right queries, read the relevant pages, and generate the report. It would then interpret the report, package up the relevant list of vehicles and digitally copy it over to your own internal system. !
What’s remarkable about this is that there’s no API required, and the “programming” consists of writing a prompt that describes what the AI should do for you and where it should do it. Previous forms of website activity automation, called RPA or “remote process automation” depended on teaching the automation where to click. If the screen format ever changed, these automations would break. Badly. With a computer use AI, the intelligent agent looks at the website with fresh digital eyes each time, looking for and interpreting the current location of a login button or an export report tab with ease.
2. Voice Agent AI
Okay, so what happens if there is no website and you typically must get information relayed to you by phone? Not so easy, is it? Well, there’s now an AI agent for that too! Voice agents can call vendors when there’s an unexpected delay to inquire about a new delivery date and find out what happened. These agents aren’t like the annoying phone trees we’ve all suffered with in the past. These new voice agents closely model an actual highly trained and intuitive person, asking the right questions in context and can handle pretty much any response that they receive. It’s amazing technology that can rapidly make a big difference. On the receiving end of the call, people find the agents to be friendly and professional and often don’t quickly realize that it’s a computer agent they’re speaking with!
One particularly strong use case example would be an upfitter with a car that is supposed to be ready but isn’t. You can have the phone agent call the vendor, whenever the vehicle is detected as being delayed, to ask for a new date and the cause of the delay. The agent can handle objections and even escalate to speak with someone who can provide answers. The responses, including the new expected date and the reason for delay, are automatically entered into the FMC master data set so that it always contains the most accurate information without the need for a person to manually input anything at all.
3. Email AI
In the same way AI can call and log in to vendor systems, it’s also able to read and send emails—if that’s the preferred way of communicating. If you receive your vendor updates via email, you can have AI read them (along with attachments) and the information that’s sent to you can be understood and used to update your overall vehicle lifecycle data.
You can also set up an email address where customers email receipts for all vehicle maintenance work that they do. AI can interpret the emails and add the expense information to the vehicle history database. Being able to understand which vehicle (by VIN or license plate) and the kind of work that was done without adding any staff to read, interpret, and copy and paste the information into another system saves both time and increases accuracy of the final product.
Better together
Finally, none of these solutions are mutually exclusive. It’s now possible to use AI to set up a workflow so that you can use these methods in concert and the AI itself understands when it needs to use a specific AI tool to collect information.
For instance, an AI workflow can check to see if any vehicles are delayed today. If so, the vendor who has the vehicle is sent an email asking for an update and reason for the delay. If the vendor replies, the AI logs the information to the system and can optionally send a note to the end client, notifying them of the delay. If the vendor doesn’t respond within one business day, an AI phone agent can be deployed to call the vendor to get a response and update via a phone call.
Over time, vendors learn that they need to proactively communicate because there is no place to hide. Your AI agents are always professional—but they won’t be ignored. And that’s all the more reason for vendors to get work completed at the promised time!
This is just the beginning
The true transformative power of AI represents as big of a change to everything we do as the Internet did before it —from its early days until its near ubiquity in our lives. New business models emerged, companies rise and fall, but the trend in technology continues to flourish. Those companies that adopted change grew and those that ignored it did so at their own peril.
If you’d like a guide into the new world of AI and leasing, reach out to Ridecell. We can help you understand more about how AI can transform your leasing business and how you can start putting it to work—today.
Author:
Mark Thomas, EVP of Alliances and Marketing, Ridecell