“If you’d asked me this question in November, I would have given you a slightly different answer.”
This was how Geotab Founder and Chief Executive Officer Neil Cawse began his discussion on the company’s current AI strategy. In 2025, AI was still helping Geotab’s development teams do their job, but Cawse said the situation has since shifted significantly.
“There’s a large number of developers now that are not writing code. That’s the big change. They are now nursing, monitoring, and guiding the AI. The AI is doing the work, and they are simply framing what needs to be done and ensuring that it gets done correctly,” he said in a media scrum during Geotab Connect 2026 last week in Las Vegas.
Innovate or perish
For Cawse, technology companies like Geotab operate as if they are on a treadmill, and if they don’t make their products cheaper or better quickly, they risk losing their competitive edge.
“You may have seen a lot of SaaS companies take a massive knock at the stock market, and there is a very good reason for this. Internally at Geotab, we will be using far less SaaS, because it is easier and better for us to personally write code using AI,” he said.
Cawse emphasised that human oversight is still paramount in any AI deployment, particularly in writing code.
Meanwhile, Sabina Martin, VP of Product Management at Geotab, said AI has changed how the company approaches R&D. “Our ability to put concepts, prototypes, and customer plans out to get feedback and iterate early has improved significantly. By using AI and other tools, we can validate concepts and give our customers real, tangible things before we invest in building them.”
During Connect 2026, Geotab unveiled a redesigned version of its flagship GO device, alongside the launch of the new GO Plus asset tracker, built on a new architecture that enables faster AI processing and more reliable data capture. The new GO device includes Bluetooth connectivity and enhanced tamper protection, while the GO Plus has satellite-ready tracking and an integrated Wi-Fi hotspot to provide a consistent data stream for incident reconstruction and operational transparency.
Geotab also featured its GO Anywhere and GO Anywhere Plus ruggedised asset tracking devices for trailers, heavy equipment, and non-powered assets, used to monitor asset loss and underutilisation in regional and remote areas.
A new voice agent, demonstrated during the main keynote, is intended to simplify reporting for fleets and drivers, and support faster responses during road emergencies.
One of Geotab’s customers, TELUS, was experiencing challenges with the paperwork that needed to be filed and integrated into its technology systems after every technician visit.
“TELUS found it wasn’t routinely done, so we thought why not solve this problem? Through the voice agent, technicians can automate workflows and connect different types of information by voice,” said Mike Branch, VP of Data and Analytics at Geotab.
To ensure they are not innovating for innovation’s sake, Branch said new product capabilities must be tied to specific customer needs.
“Oftentimes, there are many solutions out there that give you insights, but it doesn’t translate insight to outcome. What we’re trying to do is reduce collisions, emissions, and downtime, so you have to have really good, practical indicators for that at scale,” he said.
Science meets technology
One of the major announcements during Connect 2025 was the creation of Geotab Vitality, a joint venture between Geotab and behaviour change platform Vitality focused on promoting driver safety through positive reinforcement. One year later at Connect 2026, Steve Lockington, Geotab Vitality CEO, discussed with Frontier Enterprise the intersection of telematics and behavioural science.
“We built a platform designed to change how fleets engage with their drivers and motivate them,” he said. “It covers safety, fuel savings, and compliance, and we’re planning to expand further.”
A central component of Geotab Vitality is its use of AI, which Lockington said has two main applications: “The primary way is through Geotab’s predictive collision risk algorithm. It clusters different types of fleets. There’s a wide range of fleets, so it looks at vehicle type, driving style or vocation, and contextual area risk, which allows us to assess drivers on a like-to-like basis.”
The algorithm, Lockington said, prevents comparisons between a truck and a passenger vehicle, or a fleet in Australia and a fleet in downtown Manhattan, for example.
The second use of AI within Geotab Vitality is analysing driver performance in safety, idling reduction, and compliance.
“We’re using AI within those tools to understand how well a driver is doing, and we also use benchmarking to see how they compare with their peers. What we’re aiming to do is get drivers to take responsibility for their performance, so they can be incentivised to improve,” Lockington explained.
Using an app, drivers monitor their own driving performance. When they meet their weekly targets, they receive vouchers from partner merchants such as Starbucks and Walmart.
Richards Building Supply, which operates in over 60 locations across 12 US states, saw a 41% improvement in safe driving behaviour in less than 60 days, Lockington said.
“Behaviour change happens very quickly as drivers get excited. It then accelerates, and as they improve, we use behavioural science to stretch that improvement, and then it’s sustained. We’ve been working with Richards Building Supply for about six months now, and we’ve seen continued engagement from drivers, which is important,” he said.
Geotab Vitality, which is currently operational in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Arab Emirates, is planning to expand operations to the Asia-Pacific and Latin America regions, Lockington revealed.
Foundation of trust
To capitalise on AI opportunities in fleet management, a reliable data foundation is essential. Without it, outputs will be flawed, Branch remarked.
“We’ve been building that foundation for years, and it’s now helping us move faster,” he said.
Cawse also addressed concerns about organisations having noisy data, which he said can be beneficial because AI is “very good” at identifying anomalies. The greater issue, he said, is the absence of data.
“If the data is not recorded, you cannot make it up,” he said.
During Connect 2026, Geotab also announced the general availability of its conversational, multilingual AI assistant, Geotab Ace, which allows fleet teams to ask questions and receive answers without pulling reports or stitching together spreadsheets. The company said more than 3,000 customers used Ace last year.
“Data is the food for AI. In an AI-first world, what matters aren’t dashboards or interfaces, it’s the quality and completeness of the data underneath them,” Cawse said.
Getting the most out of AI, he noted, does not require deep technical expertise or complete mastery of how underlying systems operate.
“It’s more about leading the AI. It’s about teaching the AI what it needs to do, and framing the problem,” Cawse said.
