Tom Raftery: 0:03

This is the last episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 91 of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Raftery, and today's episode is a special one because it marks the final episode of this podcast under the Sustainable Supply chain podcast name. That's right. From next week onwards, this show will continue under a new banner, the Resilient Supply Chain podcast. If you've been following the journey of this podcast from the start, you'll know the podcast began life as the Digital Supply Chain podcast before evolving into the Sustainable Supply Chain podcast as sustainability became the heartbeat of the conversation. And now as the supply chain landscape keeps shifting with climate shocks, regulatory waves, and AI driven transformation, resilience has become the word on everyone's lips. So this evolution isn't a pivot, it's a progression because resilience and sustainability are inseparable. A supply chain can't truly be sustainable, if it can't withstand disruption and it can't be resilient if it ignores its environment and social footprint. To be sustainable, you have to be resilient, and to be resilient, you have to be sustainable. So rest assured the podcast, you know and love isn't going anywhere. The conversations will still explore the same themes of decarbonisation, data, and digital transformation just through a sharper lens focused on building resilient, sustainable supply chains fit for the future. And in other great news, this podcast has two new subscribers, Pritesh Mystery and Christian Sederberg. Pritesh and Christian, thank you so much for signing up. I really appreciate it. Everyone on the subscriber's bench can bunch up a little bit and make room for our two new colleagues. So now onto today's conversation, and it's a great one to close out this chapter because we're talking about telemetry, safety and sustainability, the nuts and bolts of how small and midsize fleets are cutting emissions, improving efficiency, and driving smarter with data. To unpack that, I'm joined by Naeem Bari, chief product officer and co-founder of Linxup, a company making enterprise level telematics accessible to smaller fleets. Naeem has been building these systems since long before fleet intelligence became a buzzword, and today his insights reveal how data-driven driver safety isn't just good for business, it's good for the planet. Naeem, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Naeem Bari: 2:57

Absolutely glad to be here. Thank you for having me on board today. Tom, my name is Naeem Bari. I am the Chief Product Officer of Linxup. Linxup's claim to fame is that we make enterprise level telematics solutions accessible and approachable for small to medium sized fleets. We offer easy to use vehicle tracking, asset tracking and dash cam solutions to our customers and basically help small fleets improve their efficiency, transparency, and safety so that they can get more out of their vehicles, their equipment, their tools, and their workers in the field.

Tom Raftery: 3:30

Okay. And Naeem you are one of the co-founders of the company and president of the company. What made you decide back in 2004, if I remember correctly, to go ahead and set up Linxup?

Naeem Bari: 3:47

Very good question. So I always had an entrepreneurial streak to myself and wanted to do something and this opportunity came along with a couple of co-founders. And we were always interested in the tracking and field efficiency kind of space that was our background from our previous jobs as well. So Linxup lent itself to that while scratching a entrepreneurial itch, so to speak. So we started the company and ran it for the first several years making enterprise solutions for field service automation more than anything else. But as part of that, one of the things that we offered was GPS tracking, which in those days, Tom was a game for big companies only. We are talking late, the late two thousands, right? So, you had to have a thousand to $2,000 black box that you would install into your vehicle. You would need to, you as the customer, you would need to do that. You would need to go make a deal with a cellular company or a satellite provider to get the data plans for those black boxes. And then you would need to find a solutions company like ours to put it all together. Needless to say, that was not something that a 10 unit, fleet is going to have the capability or resources to do. That was the world we existed in. Enterprise solutions for quite a while. We realised that there was a way, there was a path where we could extract a lot of the most important elements out of those enterprise solutions and make them available to small fleets, and that was really the genesis of the Linxup you see today. So we were able to get those aspects out of the enterprise software. Package it together with much more accessible, less expensive hardware that was just coming up, in those days that you could plug into the OBD2 port of your cars. That was much cheaper. So we could bundle the hardware, we could bundle the communications, the cellular connectivity, and the solution together in one easy to use package. And that's how it got started. That's got, that's what got the ball rolling in the Linxup of today. And now we're talking about the 2011 timeframe. And that was something that really was well received by the market. And we have grown from strength to strength and we have stayed true to Linxup's core mission of extracting the value out of those enterprise level solutions and offering those to our small and medium sized customers in an easy to use, approachable package.

Tom Raftery: 6:15

Okay. And what would you say has surprised you most in your journey from having enterprise level customers to now addressing the larger, smaller, and medium sized business market?

Naeem Bari: 6:28

I think the biggest surprise for me was, you know, there's this concept, this conception. Okay. If you're a big enterprise customer, a big enterprise fleet, you've got experts who are, dedicated to certain roles and functions, and they have, that's what they do. What was surprising to me is, which in hindsight probably shouldn't be a surprise because if you are a small business owner, you're running your, you Joe, the plumber, you're running your five vehicles, your 10 vehicles, your 20 trucks, you are doing so many of the things it requires to run your business, that you bring a savvy and sophisticated ness, to your approach that you don't necessarily think about. You say, okay, big fleets, sophisticated, can do all of these things. And you don't generally associate that with small fleets. And I found that to be wrong. I found that small fleets, when they're equipped with software that is more catering to their needs, they have the same goals, they have the same desires. They have the same, they, they have the same level of sophistication, if they have the right tools in their hands. That I thought was, was a, was a pretty big learning experience for me is to never underestimate the small business user. They are every bit as sophisticated as an, as any of the largest enterprises that you can find out there. That that was an eye-opening experience and that did allow us to tailor our solutions and offer more sophisticated solutions knowing that our customers, even if they're small fleets, they can hang with it. They have no problems getting it done as well. And that has worked out to be a pretty good relationship with our customers.

Tom Raftery: 8:01

And why have these smaller fleets in general been ignored and you know, not offered the more sophisticated solutions?

Naeem Bari: 8:10

The reason why that is, is because if you, let's take a look at larger fleets first. Like, why? what they offer, what they look for, so they will want not just a regular telematics solution, not just a rail safety. They have all of the, the special nuances, right? So they have very mixed fleets of different kinds of vehicles, different kinds of assets. They have a lot of edge cases, so they have a broad swath of something that looks like everything else, but then they have a broad swath of everything else. They have different needs. They need a lot of customisation. They need a lot of reporting. They have different kinds of regulatory compliance, things that they need to cater to. All of which means that solution that they gravitate towards, has all of those aspects to it, but it does increase the complications, right? It does mean there's more complex solution. And when you look at, the broader market when you get those customers and offer them those complex solutions, offer them those edge cases, those regulatory compliance options, you can charge more money. Right? And we have seen that kind of get stuck at a certain level where, if you're a small fleet, you want some of those same things, but your budget is more limited. But at the same time, you don't necessarily need a lot of those regulatory compliance things at the same level, over the same level of customisation. So you find yourself in this, almost this twilight zone of, I need some of those things. But I don't provide enough revenue to a lot of the players to be important to them. We saw that more of an opportunity rather than a, a, a barrier to entry. So we, that is how we kind of gravitated towards those. Look, we will boil it down to the basics. We'll make it that everything works simple for you. And because we can do that, means our business model is quite different. We don't necessarily need to look for those high dollar, high complexity, customers either. There's a lot more small businesses around whose businesses the way we can cater to. I don't know if that answered your question adequately, but I feel like they've been ignored because, they can generate so much revenue, whereas a lot of companies chase that higher revenue. For us, that is our sweet spot. We have the best relationship and the best understanding of that segment of the market.

Tom Raftery: 10:33

Okay, and obviously this is the Sustainable Supply Chain podcast. Where does your solution hit the road? Pardon the pun, when it comes to sustainability?

Naeem Bari: 10:46

Absolutely, so whether you're a large fleet or small fleet, you want the same outcomes. You want to maintain your vehicles so they have minimum downtime so they can run more, do more with fewer assets. Both want to reduce fuel consumption, right? They want to spend less on fuel. They want to make sure that drivers are driving safely. There's less risk. They wanna reduce risk. All of those are the same. They want, they both want their fleets to be sustainable, efficient, effective. And our solution helps them do that. We allow our customers to kind of get in there. You can think of us as the iPhone of telematics for our small fleets. A full feature solution, but easy to use, approachable. And what that allows our customers to be able to do using our solution because they don't, it's easy to use, right? That's a big thing. They wanna keep stressing. Our solution is easy to use. You can maintain your vehicles more easily. You can maintain safety. You can make sure your drivers are driving safer more easily. Our solution brings those surfaces, those issues. In an actionable format for those small customers on a daily basis. It's, it's a very tactical get it done kind of solution that you don't have to invest a lot of time and effort in learning and understanding and setting up, because it does a lot of those things for you by itself. And what we have found Tom, as just a, key finding is that we have helped our customers drive on average 6% more from the same vehicle while burning about 9% fewer gallons of gas while idling as an example. So there we have seen our customers, be able to drive more miles, get more out of the existing equipment while consuming less fuel. So we have seen that happen. I'll give you an interesting data point. We found that our customers idled 373,000 hours less from July, 2024 to July, 2025, which in turn means about 186,000 gallons, sorry, in the US, gallons of gas which I, I was doing the math there. That's over 1,650 metric tons of carbon dioxide. So our small unit fleets, of which we have a lot, were able to effectively use their vehicles while burning less gas, costing less, generating less emissions which I thought was a pretty interesting finding for us.

Tom Raftery: 13:21

Yeah. And, and from a practical perspective, how do you stop them from burning fuel and idling?

Naeem Bari: 13:29

So for example, when you are driving a vehicle, our customers will just drive the vehicles down the road. We will be monitoring several aspects of that, right? So we will be monitoring not only the diagnostic trouble codes that a vehicle can throw off, and we'll alert them to a customer that, hey, you're having an emissions problem or you're having this problem, or that problem that they can react to. But in addition to that, we'll also monitor things like if we detect when a vehicle is idling. We know when a vehicle's engine is on, but it's not going anywhere. So we monitor those and we set thresholds and we alert our customers on, Hey Joe, this vehicle or that vehicle has been idling for more than 10 minutes in one spot, and that may necessitate a, a call to somebody or if you see that happening too many times, maybe it's a particular driver who has built up that behavior of just idling all the time. And you can call them and tell them to cut it out, right? So there's a lot of human element to that as well. But we surface these actions, these things that we notice and this is all automatic, right? There's nobody doing anything about them. So if I'm the fleet manager, I bought Linxup, I installed 'em in my 10 trucks. I'm running around, I'm being told, Hey Joe, you, you need to talk to Tom. He is idling too much, and you can have that conversation and reduce that. We also monitor driver safety, right? So we that you are driving in a safe manner which we look at posted speed. We make sure that if you're going over the posted speed for too many times, we alert. Obviously if you drive at a more consistent speed at a slightly lower speed, you'll burn less fuel, right? We also make sure that if you're brake checking too much or if you're tailgating or if you're taking off like a jackrabbit, those are all unsafe behaviors that not only increase risk to our customer, but also increase fuel spend, fuel burn, just, you know, if you, if you keep pressing on the gas and taking off, that's not the best way to drive. And we monitor those and we alert our customers to those. But we also find these patterns and expose those patterns. We also have a pretty sophisticated driver scoring mechanism so a customer can take a look at it and it boils down a lot of these complex things into like a single vehicle score, right? So a single driver score. So we're saying, Hey, Tom has an A because he is just being a good boy. He is, you know, driven safely. He has idled less, he has not tailgated anybody today. Yay for the win, you know? That's fantastic. And all of those behaviors contribute to a safer, more fuel efficient fleet. It's a virtual cycle. It's a virtual cycle. It's pretty good. so that's some of the ways in which we, in which we make it easy for our customers to achieve those good outcomes.

Tom Raftery: 16:09

I'm just wondering then though, obviously in any situation where you're rolling out a telematics solution like this, there's going to be pushback from the drivers. And in the larger enterprises where they're doing it, they obviously have a team of people who are change managers or change management professionals who can swoop in and help the transition and, you know, bring the drivers along with them. Smaller companies don't have that kind of luxury, so how do they deal with the pushback from the drivers typically?

Naeem Bari: 16:46

Excellent question. A lot of it comes down to education, as you would expect, right? So we have a lot of material that we make available to a customer that's talking points. We make it available to our customers. And here's how you introduce this concept to your drivers, because obviously it doesn't help anybody if you just jam it down their throats, right? You have to tell them. Here's how it helps you and here's how it helps the people around you. And, once you kind of understand that, get on board, right? I'll give you an example. I think I could best illustrate this with an actual example, right? So, and this, this is a representative example of something that happens all the time to our customers, Tom. So, we offer a dash cam solution so you have a video, a camera in your car that's monitoring the, the forward facing camera, and there's an inboard facing camera as well. And we are monitoring good behavior, like in terms of tailgating, in terms of phone use while driving, and of course you can see where drivers will be a little bit. Oh, it's, you know, it's, it's monitoring what I'm doing and I don't necessarily like that. But a, a good example is we, we had this happen where a customer called us and they were thrilled with what we're able to do for them. They had their vehicle at a stoplight. And the car in front. You can see this clear as day in the, in the video, Tom, the car in front puts their car into reverse and just backs into them and smashes into this, into this van, right?

Tom Raftery: 18:18

Hmm.

Naeem Bari: 18:19

And then you see the people in the car getting out making all these gestures at the driver. As if the, it was a driver's fault and they basically claimed that they were rear-ended. Well, it's hard to say that you were rear-ended when there's video evidence that clearly shows that the driver, the poor driver, did nothing wrong. They were just sitting there at the stoplight, and they're the ones who got, I don't know, frontend by these people. It was insurance fraud. They were trying to do insurance fraud, and the, the video evidence was just so easy to, take care of that. And they were pretty excited. And these are just daily, weekly examples that happen that our customers deal with on a day-to-day basis where they will see things, where they're being side swiped. They have been backed into because people generally see commercial vehicles, and unfortunately a lot of unsavory people see commercial vehicles as a meal ticket. Right. I, I hate to use that, but if you're a bad actor. And you are more likely to do something to a commercial vehicle because you might be able to get more settlement money out of them. And it is very important for those fleets, for this kind of an issue. This is also a, a, thing to, talk about. Tom. What is a big problem for a large fleet is an existential crisis for a small fleet, right? If this same event happens to a small fleet, they can be run out of business just because if, if insurance doesn't cover it, if they think it's the, it is the vehicle's fault. If the driver's fault it's the small company's fault, they might not be able to get themselves insurance after that event. It can lead to a, a, a pretty bad outcome for them. For a small fleet to have this, I would contend is even more important than for a large fleet to have it. It's more important for a small company's driver to have this protection, than for a large company's driver, potentially, right? So that's how we look at it. Safety, be safe, reduce risk. And those are some of the things that we help our customers have that conversation with their drivers with, so they can get them over the hump and say, yep, this is something that'll help me, not hurt me.

Tom Raftery: 20:23

Okay. And how does this kind of real time tracking change driver behavior. You know what's, When a driver knows they're being measured, what is it that they do differently?

Naeem Bari: 21:07

When they know they are being measured, when you've kind of gotten over the hump and they have the system installed and everything is working as it should, and the real time tracking helps, the biggest thing it does is it, instills in the driver an automatic approach that Okay, if I do something, if I drive unsafely, that is going to get monitored, right? So if I'm consistently, not all the time, like not, not onesie, twosies, but if I'm consistently stomping on the brakes because I'm driving too close to somebody, if I'm consistently tailgating, if I'm consistently going 20 miles an hour above the posted speed limit, if I'm consistently doing these things, there will be accountability. That's the key word. The drivers of the fleets know there is some accountability, so it, it goes a two-way street. The driver am getting protected, but I'm also accountable for my driving. Right. So I cannot drive, like just, you know, don't care, completely rash driving. And you do see immediately, immediately you will see a drop in the number of braking events, the number of tailgating events, the number of jackrabbit starts. You will see that drop. It's measurable. We have it from our customers, they see a clear drop. And the thing is, you, you'll see a clear drop day one. There's a step function day one, just because they know there's accountability now. We have a whole module for driver coaching as well, right? So we have all of these different things. We try and partner with the drivers. It's not like a, you know, just slap your hand all the time. It's like, okay, we are seeing this. Let's help you do something different, right? So there's, it's a partnership approach. So we will see with this driver coaching sessions, with reporting, with feedback, you will see them get consistently safer and better. As an example, I told you about our July to July, factoid that I shared with you, those were existing customers, so they had already benefited from the step function on day one of having a telematics solution. This was just the incremental benefit. I don't even have the numbers or numbers of what they were before they even had a solution, but they had a step function and they got a solution. And then even then, they continue to benefit as time goes on. As the drivers get more and more effective, they get more and more used to the way things work. And it just, it's just a better outcome consistently continuously better outcome for small fleets using a solution such ours, such as ours.

Tom Raftery: 23:33

What's one surprising coaching insight you've seen from the data, can you say if, if there's been any?

Naeem Bari: 23:42

I don't know how relevant it is, but I find it very funny. So I'll share that with you. So, the government has a tailgating rule, right? They say, Hey, for every, depending on the speed, you have to be this many seconds behind a car. So our tailgating monitoring, right? If we set it up that way, all we get is complaints. It's like, oh my God, dude, you guys are alerting about tailgating when the car in front of me is miles away, right? So we actually had to go and dial it back. To me that was a bit of a surprise. We got it to a point where we thought it made sense, right? What we also found, Tom, that okay, there is no one measure, there's no one setting that works across the board for everybody. So we actually had to tailor our solution to allow our customers to set for, I'm using this as an exa, I'm using tailgating as an example.

Tom Raftery: 24:37

Sure.

Naeem Bari: 24:38

going through all of this, getting this all set up, the surprising thing we learned was like there is no one, setting in hindsight it's not surprising, but what people in the northeast consider tailgating is very different than what people in the Midwest consider tailgating than what people in somewhere else consider tailgating. I lived in the Midwest for a lot of my life and what I consider tailgating, was something that is just normal driving in the Northeast. So we allowed our customers that knob, they can just basically say, you know what? I want it this way. I want it that way. I want it less sensitive. I want it more sensitive. That actually was a little bit of a, of a surprise to me. That turned out to move the product forward and give our customers more what they were looking for. They're able to set not just tailgating, but phone use, all the different settings they can tweak. And of course, it just ends up being a better product for all of our customers at the end of the day.

Tom Raftery: 25:33

Right. And do the drivers ever feel spied on, or picked on, or push back against the oversight?

Naeem Bari: 25:42

You'll always have some drivers who will be like that, but I will say over the last 20 years that I've been doing this. It used to be a thing, it used to be something pretty normal that you had to deal with. it's just not that way anymore. I think as telematics systems as a whole have become pretty ubiquitous it's almost turned into an expectation that if you're gonna drive for a commercial fleet of any size, there's gonna be some sort of monitoring onboard that people have gotten used to. There's also been adaptation as well, right? So we give people the option of, okay, you, you can turn off the inboard camera, right? So if you feel like you're being spied upon and if the customer feels like their real opportunity for improvement lies and looking outside, not really inside. Or if it's a, contracted driver, and really you don't care what the driver is doing, you're just looking to see what they're doing outside. So there are use cases where you can adapt the solution to where you're not spied on. Another example is that by default, audio recording is, off. Like we don't listen to audio, right? So, that really shouldn't have any, any bearing on how safe you're being or how, you know, fuel efficient you're being, by monitoring your audio doesn't, there's not nothing that makes sense, so audio's off. We try and give them the options and that level of, feeling that, okay, we are not doing this just to spy on you or monitor on you. We just want good business outcomes and accountability. So if there's aspects of the system that don't contribute to that, we'll turn them off.

Tom Raftery: 27:20

Do you have feedback from your customers at all? Do you survey them, you know, what are, what do they think of, of your solution?

Naeem Bari: 27:28

We do pretty regular surveys. There's some form of weekly surveys that happen when you're using the product. We do our NPS survey pretty much every week. So, you know, the NPS question, would you recommend our product to a friend or a colleague? We do that to a random sample of our customer base on a weekly basis. We also do surveys on how are we doing for you? And what features do you wanna see going ahead in the future? So we have constant interactions with our, customers. A lot of it's automated because we do, we have at this point, over 20,000 small businesses. So we have a pretty broad pool of customers to pull from and get ideas from and get feedback from.

Tom Raftery: 28:10

And what's been the most eye-opening result from your customer survey?

Naeem Bari: 28:15

I will tell you something that changed over a period of time, over three separate surveys, over three separate years. I'm going back a few years now. Let's say probably was in like the 2020, 2021 timeframe, maybe 2019. An inflection happened just, over, it seemed almost overnight Tom. So a common question for us is, Hey, what features do you want us to offer? You know, you have dispatch, you have dash cams, you have, we didn't have dash cams at some point in time, right? So we, we didn't have dash cam. Here's 10 different features and people would rank and rate them in the order in which they wanted us to provide those features. Dash cams consistently nowhere. And we were like, okay, I guess this is just not important. And it wasn't. And it wasn't. And it wasn't until suddenly it was like just one year people woke up and said, now we want dash cams. Which was surprising to me. The market just kind of changed a little bit. Thankfully, we were ahead of the curve because we were monitoring, said, okay, people want dash cams and you know, we are kind of thinking it would be a thing. So we've been working on a solution, but. If we hadn't been just this continuous feedback loop with our customers, we would've been caught surprised because we had almost made the decision that, all right, dash cams is kind of a science project. People say they want it, but they really don't. When you get down to it and it just overnight it changed and people wanted dash cams. So that was just in continuous feedback with the customers. That was a surprising thing that happened, probably around the 2018, 2019, 2020 timeframe. So that was surprising. but other than that, I think most of what we get back from our customers is not truly a surprise, because we do always have open lines of communications with them. We talk to them a lot. We go out to the sites a lot. So if we are badly surprised, that just means we didn't do a good job.

Tom Raftery: 30:05

That makes sense. Yeah. And can you share a story of where a fleet turned things around, either safer, greener, more efficient by, you know, using these tools.

Naeem Bari: 30:16

So we had one customer that was a, trash pickup, customer, commercial trash pickup, right? So these people go out, and they pick up these big commercial roll on roll off bins from various commercial sites, and they'll take the trash and and they'll come back and they had a problem. They would often try to go and pick up trash, and either the path to the trash was obstructed or they could get to the bin, but the bin was completely overflowing to the point where they couldn't really use it. They couldn't process it, and it was devolving into a, he said, she said problem for them where it's like. They were losing business. they had irate customers and they were doing a lot of wasted truck rolls where trucks, and these were not small trucks, Tom. These were the big, these were the big, trucks. These were the big trash trucks that would go out and then wast a trip, can't get to the trash or can't, can't haul it, come back. That's a huge amount of expense, huge amount of gas wasted, huge amount of emissions, all the bad things. So they deployed our solution. And you can see it in the videos. Now, they had video evidence that they could share with the customers whenever it happened. this had several outcomes for them. One was because when a truck is unable to get to a waste because of a customer's action or inaction, they actually charged the customer a fee to cover their wasted trip, the wasted labor, the wasted gas. And what do you think happened to Tom? Right. Their wasted trips went away. So, suddenly, over the course of a few months, their business outcome was that their trucks had very few wasted trips. And when, and you can see the video evidence, you can see the before and the afters, like whenever the trucks are going. I would say a good chunk of the time, they would not. It would be a wasted trip. They couldn't pick up the trash. And fast forward two, three months into it. After deploying our solution, they could go, they could pick it up, less wasted trips, less wasted gas, less wasted time and effort, less irate customers because then they know they have something that happened. They can change the processes on their side to prevent it from happening again. So just a good, good outcome all around.

Tom Raftery: 32:30

Nice. Okay. Very good. As, as you were mentioning earlier, idling it, it occurred to me slowly but surely, 'cause my mind works quite slowly that that's not going to be an issue going forward as we move into the electric vehicle realm. So, do you have customers that have electric fleets? And are there metrics for those that are different than the metrics for internal combustion engine vehicles and what, what are those?

Naeem Bari: 33:01

A, good question. So, yes, we have customers using electric fleets, but the very first thing we've found is as, as we know that in the commercial space where you're hauling things or you have heavier vehicles, electrification is not that common here still, like you, you find, I would say the biggest part of our fleet that our customers use, they are pickup trucks or full-size vans, and bigger, right? You do have a lot of small vehicles, and in those vehicles they do find electrification. But in a large chunk of our target market, they're still using gas pickups. They're still using diesel trucks. They're still using. That change has been pretty slow to, electrification has been very slow in our neck of the woods

Tom Raftery: 33:49

Yeah.

Naeem Bari: 33:49

And in our demographic in our, in our business demographic, that change has been slower still. Like an electric pickup truck is just not gonna do the haul as much as a gas pickup truck. Like, that's just the energy density equation. You can't beat physics. But that is gonna change. That's sort of keep changing. So where we are is that we, they're definitely different metrics for them. So we are in the process of sussing that out. Okay? What works for us, for our customers? As electrification proceeds as it is doing, and it is going to do like it no matter what anybody says. EVs are here to stay. And they're only gonna get more and more of the market because they're just better in so many different ways. So we are working on that. We are working on what metrics work best for our size customers, for the kind of vehicles electric vehicles they'll be using. So jury's still out on that. That is a work in progress for us.

Tom Raftery: 34:40

Okay. And where do you see the next breakthroughs? AI coaching? Integration with city policy, something else completely?

Naeem Bari: 34:52

So you mentioned AI. I'm gonna cotton onto that for a little bit. It seems everything is AI nowadays. But I think with good reason. So obviously we've been using a form of AI, you know, we, not generative AI, but more of the, you know, the dash cam uses AI alerts all the time right? That's kind of what we use. We monitor the, the video streams and we take out the events using AI. We've been doing that for a long time. Doesn't translate over to generative AI. But we have found that, and we are hard at work on launching our AI insights solution as part of a package because we think about when we look at our commitment to our customers, it is help us do your work for you, right? Instead of you having to come and run a report to see what's wrong and then having to take an action. It used to be in the old days, it was all like report based management. Now we're in the era of exception based management. You still have to do something. You still have to set up the exceptions. You still have to monitor the exceptions. You still have to take action on those exceptions. Our whole thing is we wanna get to a point where we can solve two problems. One is we wanna be able to anticipate the exceptions you would set up, and set those up for you. And when possible, solve it for you in the manner that you will solve it. There's no reason why we can't say Hey, Tom, let's say Tom has a, fleet of 10 trucks with, drivers on them. There's no reason why we cannot set up the exceptions for Tom, the way we think Tom would set them up himself, right? So we just go ahead and set it, use AI to set it up ourselves, that agentic behavior, right? Be the agent for our customers, and set those up. And then also take action. So, hey Tom, just letting you know buddy. We gave Bill, who's improved the driving habits really dramatically over the last three months, a $25 gift certificate on your behalf, right? And bill you for it. That's the kind of thinking that we're going through, where we will be doing some of the work for our customers. That's our future. That's our future state. So we will be using AI to not only provide insights that take your data and give you insights according to how you're doing compared to your peers, how you're doing compared to the industry at large, how you're doing in your segment compared to other people. Give you those insights, which would not be available today without the use of AI. So that's something we're actively working on. And then all the way to having that agentic behavior that's more on the future roadmap where we will do some of the work for you. So you are doing less, you're having to do less. You can consider running more of your business, and you don't have to worry about setting up and managing a telematics solution because it is setting itself up and managing itself on your behalf in the way you would like it to. That's our future. That's where we see stuff going for ourselves.

Tom Raftery: 37:42

If you are a fleet manager who's listening and you feel overwhelmed, what's the first small step that they can take tomorrow or later on today?

Naeem Bari: 37:52

Well the very first step they can take is and know that look, their problems are solvable. There are solutions out there that address their problems. And you know, they should absolutely reach out to people like us and say, Hey, how. How can I solve my problems? Of course, first step is identifying what your problems are. Like, are your problems stemming from have an aging fleet is my problem because my people are driving very poor? I suspect it, but I don't know. Do you feel like you're spending too much maintaining your vehicles? Because everything seems to be a fix after it breaks rather than preventive maintenance. You, you first have to identify to yourself, Hey, what is the kind of problem I have? Second step is understanding that you may not be taking steps to solve these problems because you think they're only for the high budget fleets. Know that that is not the case. There are solutions out there that cater to you, and it is the power of Google and other search engines. It is easy enough to find solutions that cater to your particular set of problems. And that that's step one, Step one, you, you can solve it. It is a very solvable problem.

Tom Raftery: 38:56

What gives you optimism about fleets and sustainability right now?

Naeem Bari: 39:00

I think we're heading in the right direction. Tom, like you said, electrification is here. It's coming. Electric vehicles are just automatically more just by the nature of what they are, they are more fuel efficient. They do provide a lot of benefits. I mean, we've had this whole discussion of, okay, well, does it cost more emissions to create one versus whatever. It is, I think the science is out. It is very clear that EVs are part of a sustainable future and they contribute more than they hurt. So I feel, optimistic that even though in some cases we have government subsidies might be going away at this point, the science has proven itself out. I feel like that is something that is gonna be here to stay. I do feel when I look at things like where Europe is ahead, right, where Europe does things like Vision Zero, which I personally find quite interesting, and I feel like that gives me a lot of optimism that there are people who are doing that. In fact, we wanna borrow aspects of the Vision Zero work that Europe has done for our fleets here. It doesn't require all of those things that are in Vision Zero don't require government oversight or regulations to do. Some of those are like, okay, this is a really good common sense idea that our customers can, can resonate with and see the value of that right.

Tom Raftery: 40:15

For, for people listening, Naeem who may be unaware, can you just explain what Vision Zero is?

Naeem Bari: 40:21

Absolutely. So Vision Zero is this plan that Europe has of getting to a point where there are zero fatalities and zero serious injuries by 2050. Right? That's the overall big statement. But they've done a good job of breaking it up into these, into these different core values, and you can look at the core values, and it does, it's not a boil the ocean approach. It's a step by step approach. Okay. I can make progress on each of these core values slowly but surely, right? So in Europe it's a lot more mandate and public private cooperation driven. In the US we don't have something like a Vision Zero, but when I look at some aspects of it, so I hope that explains what Vision Zero is, right? When I look, I'll give you a perfect example. So I look at these context aware speed limits, right? That's a part of Vision Zero. Well, it's just common sense, right? So, but we don't have that here. But if I were able to offer it, so, okay, don't worry about what the posted speed limit is. Don't worry about what the absolute speed limit is. But if I have data on, we have data from our own vehicles that are already going across a certain route, a certain stretch of road, we know what the average speeds are. We can look to see, okay, people who drive on this with this average speed have fewer braking incidents, have fewer tailgating incidents have fewer. So this speed on this stretch of road works better then whatever the posted speed limit says whatever else you might have going on. So we can automatically raise or lower the posted speed limit so it's more context aware, right? Those are things that we can bring in, we can borrow and implement here that I think would resonate with our customers here. So, there's also if we detect accidents in certain stretches of roads, then we can surface that and say, okay, this is an area we know is prone to accidents, so there's something there. Can we just slow down? That actually is part of another core, part of the Vision Zero as well as the adaptive speed limit part two. So there's aspects of it where a lot of good work has been done there that we can borrow and implement here and provide value to our customers outta the box.

Tom Raftery: 42:31

Okay. And just on the EVs versus internal combustion engine vehicles, I posted a video about this just a couple of days ago, so I, I had to do a bit of research and look into the numbers. And it turns out that yes, it does take more emissions to create the battery that's in an EV than the motor in an internal combustion engine vehicle. So when the EVs come outta the factory, they have a certain carbon debt associated with them, but it turns out that the emissions associated with their actual operation are so much lower that by 10,000 miles driven, they've paid off that debt entirely. And so every mile after the first 10,000 miles, 16,000 kilometers for our European listeners, every mile or kilometer, after that, they have significantly reduced emissions and you're winning. And over their lifetime, they have about two to three times fewer emissions than an internal combustion engine vehicle.

Naeem Bari: 43:36

That, that's fantastic. Right? That's, that's what the science has said. It's been done, it's been set, it's been researched. So I think we can put a pin on that finally at this point.

Tom Raftery: 43:47

Okay, so if a left field question for you Naeem,

Naeem Bari: 43:51

Sure.

Tom Raftery: 43:52

if you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional, as a champion for sustainable fleets, who would it be and why?

Naeem Bari: 44:04

Oh, Carl Sagan. I

Tom Raftery: 44:07

Great.

Naeem Bari: 44:08

I would bring him back in a heartbeat.

Tom Raftery: 44:10

Fantastic.

Naeem Bari: 44:11

He had, because he, and, and you say, okay. Why, why is that? Well, he's a man of science. I think he is the, equivalent of Neil deGrasse Tyson, right? So people who make science accessible to the masses. They're just amazing science educators. And I feel like if we have people like Carl Sagan back among the living, I would say wave a wand and make that happen. Because if he, he would clearly be interested in, in topics like that. And he would probably campaign for the right science-based evidence.

Tom Raftery: 44:45

Fair. Great. I love it. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now Naeem. Is there any question that I didn't ask that you wish I did or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Naeem Bari: 45:00

You've done a pretty good job. Yeah, actually, actually, you've asked questions that I hadn't even thought of. That was fantastic. That was a really good back and forth. I really appreciate it.

Tom Raftery: 45:07

Good.

Naeem Bari: 45:08

the thing that I want to take away with is you have sustainability. And there are things that go into sustainability like using less fuel, idling less, using more sustainable type of vehicles. But I wanna stress how much safety plays a part in it. Safe driving is even though people sometimes put them as safety as on one side and sustainability on the other side, safe driving clearly leads to more sustainable driving to more sustainable vehicles, more sustainable outcomes. We've seen that like we know when customers use their solutions to coach their drivers to drive in a more safe manner, it not only reduces the risk profile of that company, but it also increases the sustainability profile as well. It isn't just safety for itself, which by itself is a perfectly good end result to strive for. But beyond that, it reduces, spend by increasing your safety, reducing risk by also makes it more sustainable using less fuel. You are using fewer vehicles to do the same job. So I'll keep that in mind. Safety and safety because of that for us, is just interwoven into everything we do. It's in our roadmap. It's, it's pretty much, it drives our thinking on a daily basis and it has a direct impact on sustainability. That would be the one thing that I would, I would remember.

Tom Raftery: 46:31

Something that I should have asked you that I forgot or didn't occur to me until just now is with that increased safety, does that then imply reduced insurance premiums?

Naeem Bari: 46:43

It does. Yes it does. So if you are continuously having fewer accidents and fewer collisions or no collisions and no accidents, then you absolutely get a reduction in premium. There are also plenty of insurance companies that if you are using a telematics solutions like ours. They will give you a break in a premium. So, it absolutely helps right away.

Tom Raftery: 47:07

Fantastic. Great super Naeem. That's been really interesting. If people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me to direct them?

Naeem Bari: 47:17

I would go to our website at www dot Linxup, that is LINX up.com. That is pretty much where all of our information is, and if you need anything from me, you can look me up on LinkedIn and it's Naeem Baari, and you can just absolutely hit me up there.

Tom Raftery: 47:35

Fantastic. I'll put those Links in the show notes so everyone has access to them Naeem. Great.

Naeem Bari: 47:39

Perfect.

Tom Raftery: 47:41

That's been fantastic. That's been really interesting Naeem thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Naeem Bari: 47:45

Thank you very much, Tom. It was a pleasure and I appreciate it very much.

Tom Raftery: 47:49

Okay. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, thousands of supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose the guests or a personalized 30 second ad roll. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of sustainable supply chains. Thanks. Catch you all next time.