Liz Allan [00:00:00]:
You.
Liz Allan [00:00:02]:
Welcome to Electric Evolution with Liz Allan. This podcast is about the journey to a more sustainable future. In order for us to be able to do our bit to achieve net zero, I'll be discussing a variety of topics with experts in their fields in order to educate and increase our knowledge of clean energy, electric vehicles and the electric vehicle infrastructure. So whether you're an individual one to make a difference at home, a small business, or a corporate, this podcast is just for you.
Liz Allan [00:00:31]:
Today on the podcast, I have got Aaron Jarvis from Geotab. And you are the associate vice president, sales and business development. That's a long title, isn't it?
Aaron Jarvis [00:00:43]:
It is.
Liz Allan [00:00:44]:
Nice to meet you.
Aaron Jarvis [00:00:46]:
Great to meet you. Yes, it is a long title. My business card is a page of a four, so I can fit it.
Liz Allan [00:00:53]:
Oh my God. Yeah, I bet that yeah, I was going to say, that takes up quite a lot of space, doesn't it? How many characters in your card?
Aaron Jarvis [00:01:00]:
Yeah, a lot. So it's more than one line, let's put it that way.
Liz Allan [00:01:04]:
But listen, thank you. Just give me a little bit of your background. How did you actually come to work at geotab? Because you were previously we were just talking off the recording. You were previously at Vodafone, weren't you? So how did you move over to geotab?
Aaron Jarvis [00:01:19]:
Yeah, good question. So I guess my background has always been in kind of the buzzword space, I like to say. So I started my career in the internet of things at vodafone, so working on a few different things from product management to program implementation and sales, but essentially working with some of the larger businesses in the world to do complicated things within the internet of things. I decided to move over to Geotab because in that internet of things there's a lot going on. And I wanted to work for a business that was kind of really trying to be the experts at one thing, and from a point of view that's connecting vehicles and getting data from vehicles. And as I'm sure we'll see from this conversation, that in itself is a whole career's worth of topics. So I wanted to get to the point where I was specializing and so Geotab worked very closely with Vodafone, as well as some other big partners like Shell and telephonica. So I still get to work with all my old colleagues at vodafone, but now I get to be kind of one of the experts working on the vehicle data side of the internet of things, while I let them remain the broad overarching umbrella to support their customers.
Liz Allan [00:02:32]:
Essentially, Geotab are North American, aren't they? Can you just tell people who don't know what geotab do, just explain explain what they do? You work in telematics, don't you? What is it that you're actually providing?
Aaron Jarvis [00:02:52]:
Yeah, good question. So I suppose to give you a bit of the elevator pitch the geotab is the largest telematics company in the world. So we have about 2.3 million vehicles connected today, and that's from about 46,000 individual customer fleets. And that can be all the way from AJ Paints, who's a relatively small to medium sized business, looking after a few vans right through to some of the largest fleets in the world. So Geotab's sweet spot, really, is any fleet manager that has an interest beyond tracking, we like to say. So Geotab's focus is getting a lot of data from vehicles and then allowing you to create insight from that data. More recently, Geotab has been focused on taking that scale that we've got and applying some machine learning and AI to it to give insights. So that fleet manager at AJ Paint is probably because maybe he's got ten vehicles. He's a small business owner, doesn't have the time that the fleet manager at a very large business where it's their full time job, might have to understand how a liter of fuel converts into CO2 emitted or how this idling might affect the fuel that they're burning and therefore the emissions or the costs. So we're trying to build tools that take what we know across all of that data and provide valuable insights to a fleet manager that maybe doesn't have time to glean them themselves, essentially. And then my role looks specifically at taking that global scale and bringing it into Europe and specifically into the UK as the majority of my work. So I joined Geotab three years ago. That was pretty early on in Geotab's journey in the UK, so we're pretty much unknown, weren't really doing much work outside of some key big global customers that we have. And today, three years on, we're one of the larger telematics companies in the UK in our own right and one of the larger telematics companies in Europe. And we've got a pretty good penetration now of those big strategic fleets, but also lots of smaller fleets that can get the benefit of that scale.
Liz Allan [00:05:00]:
So what have you seen over the last so you've been working for Geotab three years, and obviously there's now a move towards electric vehicles, isn't there? I know you mentioned about fuel and data that way, but what have you seen over the last three years with regards to kind of the move and the data that you're collecting around? Sort of like electric EV fleet, I suppose, because my thinking is, and maybe, maybe I'm wrong here, that kind of the tech availability or the tech in an EV seems to be at much higher level than in an Ice vehicle, in a combustion engine vehicle. How has it been for you guys to kind of move over towards that kind of that EV space?
Aaron Jarvis [00:05:52]:
Yeah, it's a really good question, actually. And it comes back to kind of the way I described the reason for my desire to work for Geotab. So Geotab is very good at getting data from Ice vehicles. We've been doing that for 20 years. An internal combustion engine. We add a lot of value to a fleet or a leasing company or a rental company because we're experts at getting odometer and fault codes and add blue level and fuel levels and all those good things. Which actually is nice for me, because in the UK and European market that isn't necessarily a given. There's not many telematics companies can do what we see as our hygiene factors. So we're taking real engine data and making that available in various ways. Now, when you apply that to electric vehicles, there's a few key things. First of all, as you say, an electric vehicle is both more complicated and more simple than a combustion engine, much less moving parts. But at the same time, you've got a battery that's charging and you've got energy lost in the charging cycle and all these good things. So in the data, there's different things to look at. And as you can imagine, changes in state of charge and kilowatt hours in and out of a battery. We need to measure those in quite different ways. So you'd need to measure a fuel level as an example. But also what's interesting there is the fact that fleet managers and the industry generally, and OEMs and leasing companies, don't really know what the key data points are. If you speak to a fleet manager with 30 years of experience, he'll tell you that. They'll tell you that fuel level is important, idling is important, driver behavior in terms of braking and accelerating is important for different reasons. But what's important if you've got 100 electric vans? People aren't actually sure. So we're starting to see emerging issues such as drivers who have been provided at great expense to the business, a charger at home, not using the charger at home because actually it takes 40 minutes to charge the vehicle. So me and all my mates can meet up at lunchtime, charge our vehicles and have lunch together. Which is fine, except for the fact that that's at a premium in terms of the cost of the energy. And businesses spend a good amount of money putting a charger at their house. And there's these new issues that are emerging where different data points are very important. So for that example, state of charge is very important. So Geotab puts a lot of effort into getting state of charge from vehicles, but equally puts a lot of effort into being agile to change the data points we're getting or develop. And iterate over time. And it's where we're particularly differentiated in the electric vehicle space. So we get the data points that in our experience are key today from electric vehicles, which is state of charge, energy in and out of the battery, and a few others from over 300 different makes and models of vehicles today. And that's relatively impressive once you start to get into the world of looking at, can my connectivity provider get me the data I need from the next electric vehicle I buy? Generally, the answer is no. Geotab's aim is to have the answer be yes. And it is for most of our customers, the majority of our workforce. Our work today, I would say, is focused in that space, getting data from vehicles.
Liz Allan [00:09:14]:
Okay, so what does a telematics system look like? Because I've not seen one. For example, my business is far too small to kind of, you know, kind of I'm not going to have a fleet. Well, they might be. My two colleagues are kind of trying to decide what EVs they'd like, but basically, what does it look like? Is it kind of like I suppose I'm thinking it might look like kind of the old, oh, my goodness, my mind's just gone totally blank. Just like a little box that you'd put in that's connected through to the battery. Is that is that how it works?
Aaron Jarvis [00:09:59]:
Broadly, yes. And it's interesting, the terminology you use there, the old kind of black box.
Liz Allan [00:10:08]:
That'S the only thing I could think of then. I couldn't get the words.
Aaron Jarvis [00:10:11]:
And that's specifically where I think geotab is quite different. In my career, I've worked with a number of different telematics programs. And especially in Europe, those telematics programs that have existed before Geotab's entrance into the market tend to be the lowest possible cost hardware that you can get to sell at scale in a commoditized market to get the least number of data points you could get to communicate over the air to appease the customer, essentially. So generally, that will look like a very inexpensive piece of hardware, a black box, which is capturing GPS and some accelerometer data.
Liz Allan [00:10:53]:
Okay.
Aaron Jarvis [00:10:54]:
And that can be very inexpensive and is really the minimum viable product for a connected vehicle. So it's interesting to your point there, and maybe you're a new business, your sustainability focus, and now you're providing to three people an electric vehicle. Well, actually more so than ever. Connectivity might be interesting for you there, because what I was describing before, you don't want to have a driver behavior program. You're not going to be looking to leverage your telematics data to get a better insurance quote. Frankly, the insurers aren't that interested in looking at the data from three vehicles. There's not that many levers for you to pull in the traditional sense. But actually, now that you have some drivers with electric vehicles, you can provide to them as an employer some significant gains both in their use of an electric vehicle, but also your ability to have them be efficient. So I'll jump right to the modern day. So the kind of, let's say, cutting edge of telematics, geotab is focused on taking that data that I mentioned, so, you know, the battery state of charge and the rate that it's charging, and providing tools to help drivers and fleet managers manage their fleet. So if I look at Muller Milk and Moore, probably the oldest existing electric vehicle fleet in the UK, the old electric milk float, they run good chunks of their business using dashboards from Geotab, which are showing them that over there you've got Vehicle A and Vehicle B. Vehicle A is on 80% charge and charging at this rate. And Vehicle B, for whatever reason, is on low charge and charging very slowly. And they can see on a dashboard, I need to go and look at Vehicle B because for whatever reason, it's not charging at the rate we need it to. So at 03:00 a.m Tomorrow, Liz can do her milk round it's providing those types of tools. Obviously, you can see how that works at scale for a large delivery company or a milk business. But actually, easily, if you've got an employee in your business that needs to drive to meet me in High Wickham tomorrow, and you've provided them an electric vehicle and a charger, that's great. You spend a lot of money on getting them what they need to be sustainable. That charge is not behaving correctly and it's not charged overnight. You've essentially got a breakdown event, which means they can't get to where they need to go tomorrow. So providing those tools to automatically send you an email to say, hey, Aaron should be leaving the house at 08:00 A.m.. But vehicle, it's 10:00 p.m. Now and the vehicle is not going to be charged enough to do the trip that's planned actually becomes more relevant to a small fleet than it would have been before in terms of connected vehicle things. So, off on a bit of a tangent, but I guess the point being, when you ask, what does Geotab do for a fleet manager? Our aim is to get that data and then present it in a way that's insightful to your context. So for Liz, that might be a small business that just wants to make sure that Aaron can do his job tomorrow. And the larger the business gets. That might be providing something that can go up on a big, huge screen in a depot. Or it could be making sure that all the data is present in Power Bi or into SAP, or it's getting around the business to where it needs to be because we're increasingly seeing the Fleet manager as a provider of data to other areas of the business. And as sustainability becomes more and more present and different teams are interested in the different scopes of emissions, that gets really important, right? Because you need to know how many kilowatt hours of power went into a battery to report your scope two emissions. And you need to know how much fuel was burnt for your scope one emissions. So there's lots of different customers now for the fleet manager is the way I tend to put it.
Liz Allan [00:14:42]:
So we're looking at also looking at efficient ways of driving as well and providing the fleet managers that information as well as the drivers themselves. I'm assuming that would relate to kind of harsh acceleration and harsh braking because obviously if you've got a vehicle that's got regenerative braking, then that's going to actually have an issue if you're doing that all the time.
Aaron Jarvis [00:15:13]:
Yeah, and it's more important than ever in an electric vehicle because like I say, that that traditional harsh accelerating and braking was a little bit to do with getting better MPG out of the vehicle. That's true. And in HGV, that was very true. So traditionally, HGVs have been in Europe on the forefront of vehicle data because you'll be looking at anticipation between pedals and different because as you can imagine, changing the MPG on a HGV state of business, a lot of money. And in vans, that's also true. The primary driver in vans is avoiding speeding events and bringing down the risk of collision. You take that because ultimately, if you burn a lot of fuel, you could just go and fuel up. If you burn a lot of diesel, it still only takes you ten minutes to fill up with diesel. When we're looking at an electric vehicle, changing the efficiency of an electric vehicle can be the difference between an electric bus being able to carry out its route, an electric van being able to make all its deliveries for the day, versus having to stop for 40 minutes. And what we're seeing is that that stop that I keep referring to is suddenly a breakdown event. So that is the same as your engine blowing up in a diesel van because you can't drive it anymore and now it's off road and you've got an issue and you need to charge it. So, yeah, looking at the driver behavior is much more important, like you say, with regenerative braking. And we've seen up to a 30% increase in the effective range of an electric vehicle based on changes in driver behavior. And this has led us into some really interesting programs. So I mentioned at the start, not knowing what the issues are we're going to solve with the data. We work really closely with a number of vehicle manufacturers and importers, including the Harris Group, to help their dealers essentially sell more vans. Because you'll take aaron turns up and takes an electric van for the weekend as a demo and drives it like a go cart because it's fun and it accelerates quickly and then comes back on Monday and says, yeah, it's no good for my job, though, because I couldn't get enough range. And being able to accurately look at the data from that trip and say, well, here's what good looks like and here's what you did. Try again for a couple of days and all of a sudden you have a much greater uptake of electric vehicles at a driver level. And that's really important for a fleet manager that's trying to transition a fleet. Effectively, if you get your five best drivers and give them a demo electric vehicle, and they get excited and drive it for two days like a go cart, and come back and say, well, it didn't have the range. I needed. Suddenly your whole fleet can't transition because the drivers don't want to versus actually having some data and doing some coaching with them. Now, they really like it because it's well known. And Paul Kirby would hopefully appreciate me saying drivers generally like driving electric van more than a diesel van once they understand and once they're in it, and they get all the benefits. But when they first get it, they drive it a bit like a go cart because it's fun. Anybody who's got into an electric vehicle.
Liz Allan [00:18:24]:
I've done a few test drives and I'm definitely up for buying one. I've kind of spoke to a number of people who've kind of said, once you get into an EV and you understand it and you understand what you can get from it, it is all about that. To me. It's about having continuity of driving. My husband always accuses me of accelerate kind of harsh acceleration. I drive a lot more than he does because he's a scientist, he's a climate change scientist. He doesn't want to get in a car particularly. So yeah, it's probably something that I'd need to concentrate on with regards to continuity. And I don't know whether you know John Verdikin. John Verdikin, I was talking to him a couple of months back now, and he kind of works with fleets. We were talking about that. He's the person I learned about regenerative breaking from and kind of the understanding about regen, as you're saying about that continuity I've written down as we've been talking, it is about behavior change. It's kind of about the state. In a way. It's similar to what I do in my business, improvement work. It is about behavior change. I will have to change my behavior when I get an EV, which is quite close. Now I'm talking to people about how I'm going to move through this. But how do you I mean, I don't know. Aaron, you've got to tell me this. How do you find convincing fleet managers? Like you said, you'll get somebody who kind of takes up an EV and drives it like a go car or a van, whatever, drives it like a go car. But have you found it difficult to kind of convince people who are fleet management or you've been involved in that kind of convincing to get them to move to electric vehicles and also use your products as well to kind of utilize utilize the benefits? Have you had that at all? Have you come across it?
Aaron Jarvis [00:20:43]:
Yeah. So this is where I think creating some of these let's call them off the shelf tools to make it the first step very easy because ultimately we don't know what all the challenges are. So every fleet manager will have different challenges within their business. But what we're trying to do is give you that first tool. So, as an example, we have an electric vehicle suitability assessment, which essentially means any of our customers today, as part of their product that they already procure from us, can click a button and have an output that says okay. So if you're in the UK, this is the driving real driving data from all of the vehicles you've got. So primarily looking at temperature and terrain and distance driven from a very pessimistic point of view. So looking at the very worst case, these vehicles could switch to electric so they wouldn't need to charge during the day based on the temperatures they're driving in, the distances they're driving, they can transition because we make that hopefully very easy for the fleet manager gets over that first hurdle of I don't know where to start. One of the common ones seems to be, I'm going to retire in a couple of years. That's the next person's problem. So just by having that initial thing so maybe you can just pick up our liz and Aaron. This report from Geotab just says very clearly that they could both easily change to an electric vehicle. So I'll just do that to start off with. That's the first step. And then the tool allows us to sit with them or their partner to sit with them and go into a bit more detail. What if this group of drivers, they have a lunch break so they can charge in the lunch break? Or what if this group of, you know, what if we changed the driving routes of the fleets a little bit? What if we had a bit more charging infrastructure and we can go on a journey with them? So the point is creating tools that make the first step easy. So now you're on the journey and we can work with you. And that's why we work closely with the EV Cafe to try and make sure that we've got the right ecosystem in place to then as the problems get more complex. All right, so actually, that vehicle needs to have a cherry picker on it and it needs to be able to have the PTO on for X amount of hours per day. Then we're bringing in the ecosystem or that Internet of things to solve the problem in a bit more detail. But our aim is to be that sort of gateway for fleet managers to to get over the that kind of used to be range anxiety, right? Just General Electric vehicle anxiety and into a productive thought process along the journey. And we can do all the way from that. So, Liz looking at the data from her existing vehicles on two or three through to, we've done scaled things in North America on tens of thousands of vehicles. We ran a study recently on almost 100,000 vehicles to see what we thought the suitability would be and a few levers that we would need to pull. And it was something like 60% to 70% of the vehicles that we studied could transition to electric with very few levers pulled, as it were, within.
Liz Allan [00:23:54]:
That's brilliant. It's just so clever. I always say this every time I talk to somebody. I love the technology and I get such a buzz from hearing people talk about the technology. And I know in the next kind of seven years, things are going to be changing even more because the numbers of people moving to ebik. I really hope that the numbers increase because I'm friends with people and I've got colleagues as well who would rather I'm sorry, people, I'm going to say the D word would rather drive a diesel. You know who you are, if you're listening, but I would love that person or those people to actually recognize the benefit of doing this. I'm going to slightly go off on a tangent. The whole idea of polluting and air pollution for a start off with a diesel or kind of a petrol vehicle like we've got. If you read up on that and the number of people who are either very ill or are dying from air pollution, to me, moving to an EV just makes sense if it isn't for anything other than making sure we're not killing other people.
Aaron Jarvis [00:25:27]:
It's really interesting points have around 2013 2014, decided to make this huge investment in the EV transition. So we acquired a consultancy business that really were on the forefront back in 2013 2014. Not many people knew much about electric vehicles, so we really got into that space heavily and have continued to invest there. And it's all essentially without sounding too much of the martyr about it, but for the greater good in terms of that global decarbonization piece. And what was really interesting for me, joining Geotab is joined great, awesome business. We can get all this data from electric vehicles. We've got all these tools to help people transition. Felt like we are miles ahead of the market in terms of having the right tools and being able to help people. But almost immediately we had the global semiconductor crisis, which we still haven't recovered from, and people couldn't get electric vehicles. So we at the time were working along this global strategy which had three pillars, which was go electric, operate electric and scale electric. So in broad terms, which vehicles can I make electric, how can I operate them? And now I'm operating some, how can I scale out and add my whole fleet? What we quickly realized is that even fleet managers that had committed even there's lots of fleet managers in the UK looking specifically at the UK that have said, I'm not going to buy any more Ice vehicles. All of my vehicles from now on are electric. The CEO said we're committed to it. It doesn't matter what it costs, that's what we're doing. But the next vehicle I can get is in three years time, because there's plenty of those examples, and I spend a lot of time sat at conferences with fleet managers and with leasing companies and with OEMs going through yeah, we're not actually sure when we'll get the next one of those. We can't guarantee the price for it, we can't really guarantee the spec because the whole world's in uncertainty. So we added kind of a pillar zero. So we had one, two and three. Pillar zero is decarbonizing the existing fleet and we put a bit more attention, and we'd already had it for numerous reasons. But now looking specifically at carbon emission and decarbonization around tools to help Liz who's got a petrol how can we help Liz? Have less of an impact on the environment or even just as simple as I was mentioning before, the Fleet Manager as a data product owner almost. How can we help? The Fleet Manager report on this and show an improvement. So I've seen a huge increase in the last three years on the number of the amount of work, I should say, which is awarded based more on sustainability goals than financial goals. We're doing a lot of work with Siemens at the minute, where their procurement team are very focused on only procuring things that have a positive impact on the world. So what does that mean in reality? Well, now, if I want to do cleaning work for Siemens at scale, I need to be able to show semens that I'm going to do that cleaning work in a more sustainable way every year. And vehicles, if I'm a cleaning business, obviously I've got chemicals I'm using for cleaning. Actually, if I'm doing it at scale, a lot of vast majority of my emissions are driving to and from the facilities that I'm cleaning. If we can help those fleet who can't just change to an electric vehicle today, which is all of them essentially run what they've got in a more sustainable way and report on it, then we're in a really positive position. So we've also, I'm mentioning these tools of how does my fleet look compared to another fleet somewhere else in the world, or the average of similar fleet? We're really helping fleets show that plan. So here's our emissions today, here's our emissions for the last twelve months. Here's some tools that geotab have given us to help us start the journey of improving that. And that first step likely isn't swap half of the vehicles for electric, it's probably cut down on the Idling, improve the miles per gallon and those types of things, and right through to some of the clever things that you can do with fuel injection and different things to reduce the emissions.
Liz Allan [00:29:53]:
That's brilliant. I hadn't actually thought about it in that way. And you're right, there are so many people who want to move to. Electric. But like you say, it's too difficult because of the kind of the market conditions at the moment, or more, because like you say, you don't know when you're going to get them. So actually providing with that information, that's so invaluable, isn't it? That's amazing. We tried because she was saying, weren't you before we started recording as well, about the fact that Geotab is quite a different organization to the other telematics companies that are out there because of how you've worked. You're kind of a fresh player in the market, really. Even though you've been around for a long time, you're kind of doing it in a different way.
Aaron Jarvis [00:30:44]:
Yeah, I mean, the European market for telematics is very mature. Everybody will have experience in the last 30 years of, as you say, working with one of those boxes that's in a vehicle and it's going to report whether I'm speeding. And then increasingly in recent years, now every under 25 year old driver's got one of those boxes in their vehicles because by opting into having one of those boxes, the insurer sees a significant reduction in risk for you having it versus not. What that's meant is a ton of telematics businesses that are built up to generate subscription revenue and then have gone through a lot of M and A activity to move subscription revenue from one business to another and do it more efficiently. And ultimately that means with any industry that's gone through that process, there's a lot of businesses that have been around for a number of years that have been through several efficiency exercises, let's say, which ultimately results in legacy technology and not the greatest amount of investment. What's nice about Geotab and working as part of the leadership team here at Geotab is we're still privately owned by the founder and we still reinvest significant amount of our profits every year into the development of the product and our growth. So if you look at our journey just here in the UK three years ago when I joined, I was, I think, employee number seven in the UK. And you'll notice Geotab has always referred to their employee number. So I think 7th in the UK and 700th globally. Now in the UK we're coming up to 40 employees and each one of those is adding a lot of value to the business. And globally we're over 2000 employees now. And just looking at the UK, we have a great office in central London now, which is kind of the business center where we host a lot of our clients and do a lot of our kind of front end customer facing and software work. And we also have a state of the art research and development facility in High Wickham, where we're pulling apart vehicles every day and making sure that for the UK and European market, we can get all the data we need. That's just investment by us. So we're always growing our business our team in Europe is quite large. We recently acquired a business called Intendia so that we can be on the forefront of remote tachograph download technology. We're constantly trying to expand our product and to the point of our speciality, we try to find partners to do the selling for us, in the sense that hopefully, if you're a fleet manager, part of your ecosystem can already provide you Geotab. Because we're partnered with most of the telcos, we have Shell as a partner, we have the leasing companies in Europe as partners, as well as many smaller businesses that are actively trying to work with fleets and add value there, so that most of our staff out of those 2000 can be really focused on developing the product. So we have thousands of engineers. If I look at the UK team, the majority of the team in the UK are either solutions engineers or automotive engineers. So building the product, not selling the product, our focus is on providing value on that side.
Liz Allan [00:34:02]:
And is that what the R and D team do in High Wickham then? Because that's not far away from me. That's literally 40 minutes away from me. I could come go and have a look.
Aaron Jarvis [00:34:10]:
We love to host your podcast in High Wickham for sure. And what it means is you can see loads of cool stuff happening in the background. So, yeah, we've got a great team there that are really hands on with solving fleet managers problems. So whether that's pulling apart an e transit to make sure we get the right data right through to making sure that our temperature sensors are working correctly to guarantee a cold chain, to making sure that we've got an active link for taco download. There's 101 examples that our team would get very excited about me giving of cool technology things that they're doing. That's really at the heart of what geotab do. The best example is the British Antarctic Survey. All of their scadoos, the actual boat, everything that they use or ship, I should say. I'll get in trouble for saying that connected using Geotab technology because we wanted to help that project. So now, instead of when they find something in the Antarctic, having to spend days getting back to base to report the data, we help them develop a solution based on Geotab technology that they can get a satellite link and send that data back home. There's not many telematics companies in the world, I would argue, that can work with a customer like British Antarctic Survey and others to really solve their niche problems.
Liz Allan [00:35:32]:
And I'm such a geek. I love hearing about all this stuff, I really do. I am just a massive geek.
Aaron Jarvis [00:35:39]:
Yeah, you should come to the office. The other unique thing about Geotab is most of our tools that we've built internally are named after Star Wars stuff. So our main reverse engineering vehicles is called R. It kind of goes from there. So if you come to the office, you can nerd out for sure.
Liz Allan [00:35:55]:
Oh, I love that as well. And me and my husband and my son, we're all kind of big Star Wars fans as well, so you've sold me on that.
Aaron Jarvis [00:36:04]:
We'll get your hot desk in the office if you want, and you can come in there down with us.
Liz Allan [00:36:09]:
Stop it. Now, you told me. Just rocking them up. Hello.
Aaron Jarvis [00:36:14]:
Aaron said, yeah, don't worry, they'll shoot me, not you. It's fine.
Liz Allan [00:36:19]:
What, with a laser?
Aaron Jarvis [00:36:21]:
Yeah. And then I'll be getting all the heat for just inviting people to look.
Liz Allan [00:36:26]:
At all the cool stuff. So you were talking right at the beginning, machine learning and AI. How is AI? Because this is another thing, like I say, I am such a geek for stuff like this. How is AI actually leading what you're doing? Machine learning? Because obviously I'm assuming that it's got to be a massive part of what you're doing.
Aaron Jarvis [00:36:54]:
Yes, it is. So another big part of those 2000 employees is we have over 100 data scientists that are really focused on that bit that I said. So from those 2.3 million vehicles that we have connected, we're generating upwards now of 50 billion data points a day, which is tough. We're a significant data generating business. What that means is there's a lot of value there that can be provided. But how do you extract that value? We are creating products that are interesting so in the smart city space to help local government plan their charging infrastructure, monitor the quality of their roads and all those good things. In Europe, and specifically the UK, there's a lot of talk around tolling and e tolling and what value can be added there, and we think we're well placed there. But most importantly for us, most of the work of that team is taking that huge amount of global data that we have and making it really relevant to a fleet manager. So the easiest way to explain that is around one of our key bits of innovation. So we create benchmarks between fleets and that's based on some vocations. So one of the early bits of machine learning that we implemented is right, so let's look at the Geotab UK fleet. So we've got some engineers, we've got some automotive guys, we've got some salespeople. If we look at that fleet historically, you might just say, well, Geotab is a technology company, so let's compare Geotab to other technology companies. And then you might look at a delivery business and compare it to another delivery business. But as I'm sure you'll appreciate, it's much more nuanced than that. Right? So there's no point comparing AJ Paints in the UK to a paint business in Texas because the driving that they're doing is just vastly different. Whereas actually, AJ Paints might be more similar to some small fleet in North America, but maybe AJ Paints it in Scotland, so it's very hilly and cold, and there's ten vehicles doing 100 to 200 miles a day. Well, let's compare that fleet to another fleet that's doing something similar. And all of a sudden you go from only being able to compare delivery fleets in the UK to other delivery fleets in the UK. To being able to compare fleet globally that have similar behaviors and similar activity. And that's where we suddenly unlock a lot of value. So now AJ paints as a fleet manager, we can provide insight, which is, well, what does the Idling look like for the best fleets that are similar to you and the worst fleet that are similar to you and create a benchmark. So then we're starting to present to fleet managers just staying on the Idling point, right? So the top out of all the fleets that are similar to you in the world, the best fleets have this much Idling as an average, the kind of 80th percentile, which is kind of good, have this much. And here's you, so you're below or above. And then coming back to my earlier point around, how are fleet managers able to support their sales team winning that business? To say, well, what's your sustainability, what are your emissions today? And what are you doing to improve it? But actually, one, being able to report it, and two, to be able to show where you compare to other similar fleets factually from a trusted data point, which is geotab, and then what geotab tools are you using to improve that? That's where we're really starting to use the machine learning point. That's a high level example. And then we have plenty of examples going right down granular into detail. So we can look at the cranking voltage down to a millisecond between vehicles and say, well, this behavior led to the alternator failing or the battery. Failing. And then on a micro level be able to say, okay, Liz, the battery in your transit is going to fail soon. Because we've seen this behavior on 10,000 transits. The battery failed. Next. So you see kind of the micro and macro versions of how we're using. And I could go all day with.
Liz Allan [00:41:15]:
Examples, but mind blowing. That's amazing. Honestly, you've totally opened this up to me because I thought I knew, but I didn't know enough about what you did. So that is absolutely just totally mind blowing. I'm just thinking that I could probably talk to you all day about this because of the fact that I'm just geeking out on this, but I think I might have to get you back on again with another time. If people are interested, there are fleet managers or people in general who are interested in talking to you about bringing their fleets on board with geotab. How do they find you? How do they get hold of you?
Aaron Jarvis [00:42:09]:
Good question. So we have a website, as you'd imagine, so geotab.com, and if you go through there you'll find, request a demo and all that good stuff. Equally you reach out to me on LinkedIn, I can put you in touch with our team and make sure that you're kind of directed in the right way. And then generally looking specifically at the UK and Europe, we're present at most industry events, so you'll always find someone from Geotab or a Geotab stand somewhere around, so hopefully you can find us relatively easily or I'm not doing my job well enough, let's put it that way.
Liz Allan [00:42:43]:
And you're going to be at Fully Charged in April, aren't you?
Aaron Jarvis [00:42:48]:
The ITT hub. Yeah, we're everywhere.
Liz Allan [00:42:52]:
Are you going to fully charged? North and south then? Or south?
Aaron Jarvis [00:42:56]:
I believe so, yeah. I'm speaking at Fully Charged South and I'm just waiting for the plan for Fully Charged North. So yeah, hopefully we're there if you need us.
Liz Allan [00:43:07]:
And for those of you that don't know about fully charged. Fully charged. It's fully charged live. That is kind of Robert Llewellyn's who is one of my favorite people and I've not actually spoken to him yet on this, I would love to if anybody remembers Red Dwarf and Crichton, he played Crichton, bless his heart, and he's been running this YouTube channel for about twelve years I think now, isn't it? And he has this live event that happens. It's kind of grown to something massive, hasn't it? So this Fully Charged Live down in the south, one is in Farmbray in April, there's another one, I think it's in May up in Harrogate. It might be an excuse for me to go and find my Northern friends when I go up there and then they're all over the place, I think is he in Australia at the moment or something? I'm flipping, yeah, all over the place. So yeah, check it out because it's definitely worth and obviously seeing you, so hopefully I'll actually be able to bump into you down there.
Aaron Jarvis [00:44:17]:
Yeah, we'll be there. And we're actually supporting Fully Charged in a number of their global locations as well, so you can find Geotab with Fully Charged pretty much everywhere as well.
Liz Allan [00:44:27]:
Fantastic. And also because you're a sponsor of the EV Cafe, you are mentioned a lot on there anyway, aren't you, by all the team?
Aaron Jarvis [00:44:36]:
Yeah, they have to Because we sponsor them. But, yeah, as I mentioned them before, they're quite well aligned with our objectives, so I didn't mention it much today. But big part of our goal. Is to make sure we have an ecosystem. Around our product of insurers and charge point operators. And that's very similar to the way the EV cafe operates. So we feel well aligned with them.
Liz Allan [00:45:00]:
Yeah, they're a good team, they're a good bunch. But listen, thank you ever so much. You are also on LinkedIn, aren't you? But I don't know how kind of regular you're sort of posting on there, but I have seen you've got an account on there if people want to find you, I suppose.
Aaron Jarvis [00:45:16]:
Yes, I'm there. It's been really great to speak with you, Liz. Thanks for inviting me on.
Liz Allan [00:45:21]:
It's been, like I said, geeking out with you. Fantastic. Loved it. So, yeah, thank you very much, Aaron. And so I'm going to say goodbye to everybody else, but thank you to you and see you later, everybody. Bye.
Liz Allan [00:45:36]:
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