At Mobility Live 2025 in Sydney, Will Batty, Associate Vice President – Business Development APAC at Geotab, addressed one of the most pressing challenges for Australian fleet practitioners: keeping drivers safe while managing increasingly complex operations.
“Fleet management today is a constant battle,” said Batty. “Vehicle incidents are the number one cause of work-related fatalities in Australia. The last time we did these statistics, back in 2023, we had 84 lives lost on the road — that’s 42% of all worker fatalities.”
The presentation reminded delegates that beyond tragic outcomes, crashes carry significant business consequences. “There are direct costs like vehicle repairs and insurance premiums,” Batty noted, “but also indirect costs that can have even more impact — vehicle downtime, lost productivity, and damage to brand reputation amplified by social media.”
For more than two decades, telematics has helped fleets manage these risks through visibility and accountability. Batty described telematics as “one of the key solutions we use when it comes to technology and helping drive safer fleets,” pointing to driver safety scorecards as the foundation of most fleet safety programs.
“These scorecards gather essential data to identify drivers who might need coaching,” he said. “They can be customised to your business, aligned with your safety policies, and used to create coaching and gamification programs that drive change.”
But 2025 marks the start of what Batty calls “a new era” — one shaped by artificial intelligence. “The world is being reshaped by massive developments in technology, and the catalyst for this change is AI,” he explained. “Tools like ChatGPT and Copilot have thrust AI into the spotlight, but we’ve actually been using AI for generations in telematics to analyse and process data. What’s changed is the speed and accessibility of it.”
From reactive to predictive
According to Batty, the next generation of AI will transform how telematics supports safety and optimisation. “Traditional AI helps us analyse data for complex patterns and forecasting,” he said. “But generative AI takes it further — it allows us to have a natural conversation with our data. It doesn’t just see what happened; it understands context, predicts future risk, and enables faster insights.”
Geotab’s focus now is on applying these advancements across what Batty calls the safety methodology framework — gather, intervene, and react.
- Gather: “Good quality data at the vehicle level is the starting point,” Batty said. “Now, with AI, we can capture richer insights like driver distraction, fatigue, and even environmental conditions.”
- Intervene: “AI allows for smarter, real-time interventions — for example, detecting fatigue and intervening before a driver falls asleep at the wheel.”
- React: “We can combine scorecard data with video to understand the ‘why’ behind incidents and create stronger workflows for corrective action.”
But the real breakthrough, he said, comes from predictive safety. “AI gives us the ability to identify and mitigate risks before an event even occurs,” Batty explained. “It adds a completely new dimension — predictive analytics and benchmarking that help us take preventive action instead of reacting after the fact.”
The evolving role of fleet practitioners
For Fleet Managers, these developments signal a shift from monitoring to strategy. As telematics platforms become more intelligent, practitioners can spend less time analysing spreadsheets and more time leading improvements. “The next five years will be led by those that adopt AI into their daily operations,” Batty said. “It’s about using technology not just to collect data, but to understand it and act on it.”
The session concluded with a clear message: safety remains the top priority, but AI-powered telematics is now central to achieving it — alongside gains in efficiency and sustainability.
“Preventing fatalities will always be the number one goal,” Batty said. “But with AI, we can go further — we can predict, prevent, and continuously improve. That’s the future of fleet management.”
For Fleet Managers, the takeaway from Mobility Live 2025 is clear: the telematics data already in your vehicles is becoming more powerful by the day. With AI turning insight into foresight, the next evolution of fleet management has already begun.
