At its core, a good fleet hack doesn't have to reinvent an operation. It solves a point of friction that has become part of the everyday routine.

The Fleet Hacks series highlights the seemingly small, practical ideas that can save fleet managers time, money, and headaches.

For this edition, Automotive Fleet connected with professionals to uncover strategies that can be put to work in everyday life.

Let AI Handle the First Pass

Fleet managers aren't exactly lacking data, emails, reports, meetings, and messages to review. The challenge is finding the time to sort through it all and determine what actually needs attention.

For Lori Olson, a fleet technology leader with experience across telematics, customer success, and AI-driven workflow automation, one answer has been letting AI handle the first pass.

Every morning, Olson asks an internal AI agent to create a list of the top conversations happening across different internal chat rooms. Rather than spending more than an hour combing through each conversation individually, she can get a roughly 10-minute recap of what's top of mind.

It's a relatively simple use case, but it points to a larger question fleet managers can ask themselves: Which tasks am I still doing manually that I don't need to be?

Jen VrMeer, manager of sales operations at BD, automates first reminders, such as mileage reporting, maintenance, violations, safety training, or documentation, and more. Personal outreach can be for more specific needs.

“Internal fleet discussions specifically identify automation of reminders, escalations, and reporting as a way to redirect lean teams toward higher-value work,” said VrMeer.

The hack isn't about eliminating communication. It's about deciding which communication actually requires a person.

Build It Once, Use It Again

Olson recommends looking beyond one-off AI prompts and identifying repetitive workflows you can build once and reuse repeatedly.

Fleet is full of recurring processes. Quarterly business reviews, maintenance summaries, benchmarking reports, onboarding, meeting recaps, and data organization often require similar steps each time.

Instead of starting from scratch every month or quarter, fleet professionals can look for opportunities to create repeatable AI workflows where the structure stays largely the same and the information changes.

For example, Olson pointed to a quarterly business review workflow that could pull relevant telematics data, safety events, fault codes, and support history into a structured presentation for leadership.

The same idea can be applied on a much smaller scale. A fleet manager who repeatedly asks AI to organize the same type of spreadsheet, summarize meeting notes, or format a recurring report can save the instructions and create a more consistent process for the next time the task comes around.

Olson describes the principle simply: build once, run many times.

VrMeer replaces longer case status reviews with quick vendor cards covering aging items, repeat issues, SLA misses, and more. 

“It shifts vendor meetings from updates to decisions and accountability,” said VrMeer.

Know How AI Got to the Answer

Saving time doesn't mean removing the fleet manager from the process.

Oleg Cytowicz, a longtime fleet industry professional, offered a simple piece of advice for fleet managers incorporating AI into their work: use some of the time AI saves to understand how it developed its answer.

AI can quickly summarize information, organize data, or generate an analysis, but the fleet manager is still responsible for what ultimately gets presented.

As Cytowicz put it, when leadership has questions about the information being presented, the fleet manager will answer them, not the bot.

That means reviewing the source information, checking important figures, and understanding the logic behind an AI-generated conclusion before putting it into a report or presentation.

The goal isn't necessarily to remove yourself from a task entirely. It may simply mean spending less time gathering and organizing information so you can spend more time understanding and acting on it.

Where Can Fleet Managers Start?

Fleet managers don't need to begin by connecting AI to every vehicle, data source, or system in their operation.

Instead, Olson recommends starting close to the work that's already being done.

Think about one task you completed manually this week that followed a predictable pattern. Maybe you summarized a meeting, organized a spreadsheet, reviewed a stack of reports, or prepared a recurring update.

Could AI handle the first pass? Will you have to complete the same task again next week, next month, or next quarter? If so, could you save the process and reuse it?

And, importantly, what information would you need to verify before using the output?

Start with one repetitive task. The time savings can build from there.