What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
The Road to Safer Driving Through AI
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Ever wonder what would happen if we completely reimagined driver safety? What if instead of focusing on mistakes, we celebrated what drivers do right? That's exactly what Netrodyn is doing with their groundbreaking AI-powered approach to road safety.
Netrodyn, whose name literally means "the power of vision," is transforming fleet safety by using artificial intelligence to create a positive relationship with drivers. As Adam Kahn explains, traditional safety approaches focus on the few things drivers do wrong, when in reality, drivers do hundreds of things correctly each day. By acknowledging good driving behaviors while providing gentle, immediate feedback for improvement areas, Netrodyn has created a system drivers actually want to engage with.
The results are remarkable. When implemented with a major delivery fleet struggling with stop sign compliance, Netrodyn's in-cab notification system reduced violations by 35% in the first week and 75% within a month. No shame, no blame—just timely reminders followed by recognition when drivers improved. This approach works because it's frictionless and respects drivers' dignity while still achieving dramatic safety improvements.
Serving customers ranging from armored cash carriers to snack delivery fleets and school transportation, Netrodyn's technology identifies critical driving behaviors through sophisticated AI that can recognize everything from stop signs to vehicle types. What makes their system unique is the immediate feedback loop—"act now, talk later" as Adam puts it—coupled with positive reinforcement that creates lasting behavioral change.
The future looks even brighter as Netrodyn explores predictive capabilities that can warn drivers about hazardous conditions before they encounter them, powered by computing technology thousands of times more powerful than standard laptops. While fully autonomous vehicles may still be years away, Netrodyn is making everything that moves smarter today, dramatically reducing the statistical likelihood of accidents.
Want to see how AI-powered positive reinforcement could transform your fleet's safety record? Visit Netrodyn's website to learn more about their innovative approach that protects drivers, improves retention, reduces accidents, and delivers measurable ROI.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, really exciting discussion today as we dive into the future of road safety and AI innovation. With Netrodyn, we're using cutting edge tech to make driving safer and smarter. Adam, how are you?
Speaker 2:Man, I tell you what I'm doing. Great Thank you for having me on the event here.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here, Really intrigued by the mission and the big idea you're moving forward. For listeners and viewers who may not be familiar, how do you describe uh Netrodyn in a nutshell?
Speaker 2:Well, I tell you what one of the things that I I always start with is. I I tell people like, watch when you're driving, just look around, you know, is it does it feel like it's getting calmer or more congested and overall, you know like I was driving home the other day and I was watching this person in the car next to me and I think they were watching a movie the whole way home. So you know, it's certainly getting more congested. And one of the things that Netrodyn really wanted to do was get to the root cause of how do we make roads safer, and that's a very novel idea. But I think one of the things that we really focused on was can we have a relationship with the driver where they want to improve? Can we motivate them, can we engage them in a very transparent way that naturally they, without even knowing it, they become better drivers. And I think that approach is really one of the foundations of Netrodyn.
Speaker 2:Netrodyn, in its word origins, is the power of vision and so the ability for us to use AI learning models to really assess what's happening on the road and then coach the driver and when I say coach, evan, you know historically you think about safety on the road of. Let me tell you the 10 things you did wrong. Today I might suggest that there's probably 950 things you did right, 50 things you did right, and I think that you know, with any human you know, that's always a much more engaging conversation to you know, have a complete picture of what you did versus you know the two or three things that maybe you missed. And so we certainly used technology with the focus of you know, interacting with drivers in a very positive way.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 3:Well, let's take a look at your website and a video that you guys have to see Netrodyn in action, because they get rewarded for good driving and they can manage their own success by coaching themselves. Fleets see reduced accidents, lowered insurance costs, improved driver retention, an ROI that results in increased profits, and our system is an all-in-one solution that can help you with fleet management and compliance, just in case you need that too.
Speaker 1:Wow, that looks really powerful to say the least.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was snappy Pretty good.
Speaker 1:So who are your customers and how are they putting your technology to work?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if you think about the people that we really start to care about, well, I'm going to back up for a second. We care about everyone driving on the road, the road, but the vehicles that probably have the more focus are something that has a brand on the side of the vehicle, or they're moving people or they're moving cargo right. So those are all very critical transportation modes that we service. But some of our customers are the largest cash transport carriers the armored car, the armored car you know the largest retailers in the United States. You probably see. You know the vehicle pull up to your house a couple of times a day with deliveries.
Speaker 2:We have some of the largest private fleets that you know.
Speaker 2:One of the fleets is one of my favorites growing up in middle school was you know the snacks that you got in the cafeteria? You know they're a main supplier for that. And then we have some of the fleets is one of my favorites growing up in middle school was you know the snacks that you got in the cafeteria? You know they're a main supplier for that. And then we have some of the very largest I call it commercial trucking fleets. That that certainly carry a lot of cargo in our, you know, really supply us with all the goods that we need every day, goods that we need every day. And the other end of the spectrum, you know, some of our great, you know biggest customers are moving students or, you know, having a, you know, ride share type activity. So, you know, I think when we look at you know our typical customer, it's, you know, somebody who's moving people, which are very valuable, or moving freight, which is very valuable and has, you know, and those both have commercial applications to their businesses.
Speaker 1:Amazing, and has your technology and AI in general required us to change the way we think about road safety?
Speaker 2:You know what? In this case, I was thinking about how that really worked and we really thought about what causes an accident, right? So there's four or five things that represent almost a large majority of the source of an accident. Maybe you're too close to the car in front of you, reducing your response time. You're driving too fast Again, your response time is jeopardized. You're driving too fast Again, your response time is jeopardized. You're distracted or you're not thinking about. You know, your action in the intersections is a little risky. So all of those have a large footprint on sources of accident.
Speaker 2:The way that our systems architected is that we have an immediate identification when those events happen. Right, the traditional model is I might sit down with you a week later and talk about the three intersections that you ran through last Sunday. Well, a lot of people, you know they're so focused on their jobs they really don't recall at 104 on Sunday afternoon, did I or didn't I? Right? So the trick is can you act now, talk later. Right? Can I use the information that we've gathered, which is through AI modeling? I know it's a stop sign. I know it is through AI modeling. I know it's a stop sign. I know it's a red light, I know what the posted speed sign is, I know what kind of objects in front of me car, bus, motorcycle and I can direct action to the driver immediately. Please slow down, put down your phone, create some space, remember to stop.
Speaker 2:But the cognitive improvement that people don't recognize is that if you remove, I'll call it negative energy. If you don't fill that back up, it comes back. You know, think about we've all been in diets together, right, and we've. You know, we're super focused and we lost 20 pounds and we feel really good about it, and about two months later we found 10 pounds back, right, because we didn't fill that bucket with something positive. And in this case we have a set of recognition elements that follow up to say please remember to stop. And if you stopped at that stop sign, for the next 75 stop signs in a row, there's added recognition that I'm going to reinforce. You know the already acknowledgement of good driving.
Speaker 2:So I think that that formula has really, really our attach rate with drivers is very high because it's frictionless, there's not a lot of shame, there's not a lot of oh boy, boss wants to talk to me what. You know what I do now and you know it has that soft cognitive approach, like you know. Someone might ask you to take out the trash. You might do it in the very first ask. I'm a little slower. It usually takes me about two or three times to remind me to take out the trash.
Speaker 2:But it's all about when our brains are ready to repair and sort of remove that distraction. In this case it's hey, you're going too fast, okay, I got it, I'm going to. Okay, I'm going to now slow down because I don't want to hear that thing talk to me anymore. And the backside of that is, if you actually slow down and change your habit, then there's a trophy at the end of that action. So it's worked really well. Drivers are very responsive. You know everyone's very conscious of being watched and judged. But I think if I added a third peg to that stool of watched and judged and recognized for you know and rewarded, I think it becomes a much more solid, you know, engagement.
Speaker 1:Brilliant Love the positive reinforcement approach to safer driving. You must have so many stories and anecdotes about the impact you're making Any that you can share. What have you seen so far?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was interesting. I ran a pilot with one of our larger customers and it's a delivery network and after a couple of weeks we were working with this particular customer and I said to them you have a stop sign problem. I go, you do, and you don't I go. As an example, I can tell you how many stop signs you actually fully stopped at, so I know how many times you rolled through a stop sign. So I know how many times you roll to a stop sign and I know how many times you didn't stop I got.
Speaker 2:The good news is that you're in the high eighties, low nineties for uh, for compliance. However, uh, that 9% that you know, call it 12%. You know nine out of the 12% as remaining is no stops, which is you, is no stops, which is you know that's. You know you have a brand and you want to protect that brand and also you don't want to delay any kind of deliveries because of accidents. Well, they came back and said no, no, no, adam, it's just around our DCs, we understand all the vehicles get dispatched in the morning. It's like a caravan out of the parking lot and nobody nobody, you know recognizes that one stop sign at the end of the parking lot and nobody recognizes that one stop sign at the end of the parking lot.
Speaker 2:So we went back and looked and the problem there was a small sliver of that happening. But what we did is we essentially activated the in-cab notification to the driver and it was the perfect A-B example of we knew what the action was before we turned on this notification. It was a soft reminder Please remember to stop right. So after I went to a stop sign, it didn't distract you but it, you know, it planted the seed right, so that a seed is planted, now it's growing um. And what we saw was the very next we had a 35% reduction in no stops. After four weeks we had a 75% reduction. So that number that was in that high 80s 90s was now in the right way, certainly allows you to walk through a doorway together, versus pulling someone through you know the doorway and forcing them to do something.
Speaker 2:So you know, I've seen great results and all those actions matter right, because if you change your driving habit then the likelihood of an accident reduces and the likelihood of that driver not getting home to their family is reduced. And the court you know the company who you know delivers to us they're not jacking up their delivery charges to us. So there's so many great benefits of not having a crash. Mostly, you know, I sort of attach it to like getting people home with their families is super important.
Speaker 1:Wow, what a wonderful story. So, looking ahead, I mean AI and machine learning, machine vision is just, you know, speeding at a day-to-day, week-to-week incredible pace. How do you see Netrodyn leveraging all those advancements and how is your own AI evolving over time?
Speaker 2:over time. Yeah, so I would say, you know, the scenarios I just talked to were more reactionary. Right, there was an action ahead and I've sped up the response to the change or to the workflow, right, so you know, you see that now, like if you're writing an introductory paragraph for you know, for an email, and you kind of want the right wording and you might use an AI tool to, you know, kind of speed up your, you know your process? I think not, think I know that the next step in AI, when you start building out these large models, there's a massive ability to start producing predictive results. So, hey, you're driving through Pittsburgh, it's the middle of December. The last eight years, you know, uh, in this middle of December, you know the snowfall has been five inches. You know, expect snow, right, so you can start to start mine historical data, either, uh, geographic or driving data, and you know where you can really recognize those patterns. And once you I really recognize those patterns and once you can recognize those patterns, I can start to be proactive. Um, the other things you can start seeing is where, um, you know that's a huge advance, you know. So I call it instead of reactive, it'd be proactive ai.
Speaker 2:The other piece that I think is really interesting is to compute power of where different systems can start sharing information. So I might be able to look at a large set of video and say you know, customers can do this. Today I might upload 30 minutes of video because my driver said somebody threw a rock at my car, but I don't know exactly when. Now I got 20 minutes of video. I can either sit there for 20 minutes I've been looking for the one guy who threw the rock.
Speaker 2:There are certain AI tools that are really interesting that I can take large chunks of data and say, in these 25 minutes of video, find me anyone with a throwing motion with a rock, and it will like filter down to those two minutes of video. Again, one of the big benefits of AI is to take a lot of information and distill it into streamlined action, and that's exactly what the Driver Eye product does. We mirror that AI model of massive amounts of information and distill it down to please slow down or put down your phone, or good job on creating space, put down your phone right, or good job on creating space. You know they seem so simple, but you know the ability to harvest all that is pretty complex and it's very cool.
Speaker 1:I bet we may need a couple hours just to dive into all of that. So beyond the you know huge opportunity you have ahead of you in trucking, you know what other industries or use cases do you think can benefit from your technology.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of activity. So if I started the driver's seat and I started working my way out, right, so the driver at a moving vehicle, you know 80% of those activities are almost the same in any industry. Now, a school bus versus oil and gas company, you can imagine there's a different driving style and a different, you know, care. But in all those activities like taking school bus and oil and gas, it might be very interesting to start to develop analytics around the non-driving environment, right? So where are the students crossing, you know the stop sign on the on, the on, uh, on the school bus, or as they move out, in front of the hood of the vehicle, um, or an oil and gas, you know what is the action when I'm hooking up, uh, pumps and hoses, uh, or if I'm making a delivery, when I go into the store and I have a dolly full of totes, you know, and I left my back, uh, my back, uh, you know door open. You know, and I left my back, my back door open. You know how do I monitor? You know shrinkage and inventory, things like that. So I think that's a natural step. And then, on top of that, you know I had made mention of things like micro weather, or you know I call it flash traffic, or you know things like that, I think, are very impactful where where I might be able to tell a driver you're about to pull into Denver and they just got hit by a snowstorm. You know a flash snowstorm. You know, do not go over that pass. You know near the mountains, because I think it's I-70, but do not go on I-70, because you know nothing's moving, so I might as well park you in Denver versus having you stuck on the highway. You know with spoilage. You know on your load or your driver's not getting home. You know when they're supposed to. So I do think you know, as we extend outside the cab, there's just so many workspaces and the good news is, evan, that.
Speaker 2:So I'll give you a magnitude of power. Your laptop has a gigaflop processor in it and I don't know why I know all this information, but I just committed to. You know, I'm not an engineer, so I just uh, I, you know, I just know these numbers, but it it allows your laptop to do about a billion transactions per second, the first version of driver eye. We're talking about a teraflop, which is a trillion calculations in seconds. So that means the driver eye device has compute power about a thousand times more than a laptop. The platforms that we're talking about now have a 10 to 15 X of that number of that number. So you know, if you think about the magnitude of the power of that data consumption, you can be 10 to 15,000 times faster than your computer. And your computer is probably really fast, right? So when you can start to analyze massive amount of data and very you know, and apply tremendous compute against it, you know the opportunities are really, really solid.
Speaker 1:Amazing. And then you add the power of 5G or Starlink or other technologies for the cloud.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 4K, 5g, all these things that just make things faster and clearer. And you know again that act now, talk later model just gets better, because now I'm looking at every one of your actions and the sprinkle on it is that I can also confirm that you're doing exactly what I asked you to do or you're doing above and beyond right. So that discretionary effort is a huge thing to. You know, you got some drivers who just do the bare minimums and you know that's great. But then you really want to capture the moments of excellence and put a shine on those drivers, because that feeling is is contagious. If you got drivers that are locked into that, new drivers will gravitate towards that right. You gravitate towards the energy that's in the room right. If you got people complaining, everyone complains. If you got people who are happy, everyone becomes happy, happy, right. So you know that's really the. You know the, the, the influence or the. You know the support that we give to some of these companies to change the attitude in the room and then others will follow.
Speaker 1:Wonderful vision. So you're already leaning into the future. But if you were to fast forward three, four, five years, what impact do you see yourself making on driver safety, potentially, and even just the broader transportation environment?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think everything that moves will get smarter.
Speaker 2:You know, the big question is always when do you think autonomous vehicles are coming?
Speaker 2:And I, usually, I put a pin in that one and I'm like, well, I know how old I am and I know the timelines they're talking about.
Speaker 2:I might not see it, my kids might see it, but I do know for certain that everything that moves will get smarter. Right, the vehicles will have a much better aptitude for their position around other objects, the drivers will have more visibility in a in a receivable way, and so I just think everything was going to get a lot smarter and you'll have, you know, just a natural elimination of the I'll call it the statistical crash, right, just, you know, eventually, if you back up your vehicle a thousand times, there will be one moment that you hit something. Right, it's just statistics, you know, against the large set, but I think that number will inherently shrink because, again, the vehicles you're seeing it now in your passenger car, you're seeing it in commercial vehicles. So you'll just have these large data sets that just help, you know, remove those, you know, remove the fringe cases and push out the likelihood of an accident even further than reducing an accident.
Speaker 1:Wow, what a wonderful goal. So you guys are in hyper growth mode at Netrodyn. What are you up to the rest of this year? You must have a busy schedule ahead of news announcements, customer meetings and beyond.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the fall everyone gets back to work after, you know we spent summer vacation off or, you know, traveling. So typically September, october, november, you know there's always a lot of meetings where you know the different segments that we support, you know, get together and talk about best practices. We are actually kicking off a, you know, a customer tour. So a little sneak peek is we have a Madden-esque sort of experience that's going to be traveling the country and visiting some of our customer locations and then I just think that later in the year, you know that, that enablement of platform that I talked about, that explosion of power, you know that's in the near term where we'll start to explore what does it mean when I get that? You know, tens of thousands of X power improvement over what happens today. So I think all those are very exciting.
Speaker 2:Netrodyn we continue to grow. You know we have customers that you know are very gracious with their time and they tell prospects, their experience. We have offices in San Diego, san Francisco, we have a really, really large office in Bangalore where a lot of our engineering team is, and I believe we just expanded to an office in the Midwest. So you know we're just, you know we're a global company and we continue to sort of serve really, really important companies. You know big brands that you know also serve the you know the globe, you know they're international and so you know how you might operate in Japan or how you might operate in Spain or Germany or the UK or the US should be have very similar properties of trying to, you know, get drivers home, you know, safe. You know I feel like it's a little bit of like a canned political statement but I, you know, in my heart I do believe that you know that is the goal of that. If I meet someone who drives, you know I don't, I don't want any bad to happen to them.
Speaker 1:Well, it's an important mission, Um, and all of us on the road are rooting for you and the team. So congratulations onwards and upwards.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you, and we uh, we'll take all that, we'll take all that energy and turn it into good.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining and sharing the big idea. Thanks everyone for listening, watching, sharing this episode, and be sure to check out our new TV show, tech Impact TV, now on Bloomberg and Fox Business. Thanks, adam, thanks everyone.