PREDICT, PREVENT, PERFORM- Chargelab's AI Fueled Drive Toward 99% Uptime

Inside The Episode:

• Origin story: Zak’s path from early EV enthusiasm (2016) to founding ChargeLab in 2020 and growing to tens of thousands of managed ports.
• Why “smart” matters: Moving beyond “amenity” chargers to networked, monetized stations with payments, load/energy management, and telemetry so sites can scale from 2 to 20+ ports without blowing the panel—or the budget.
• Operator value props: ChargeLab’s CSMS (charger management), seamless QR/Apple Pay activation, robust energy management, utility integrations, and fleet/multifamily/workplace/public use cases.
• Reliability realities: Why ~20% failed public sessions (historically) happened—connectivity, firmware/backend misalignment, OCPP implementation differences, and driver flow issues—and how the industry is maturing past Gen-1 pitfalls.
• AI in the loop (Spark): Proactive monitoring across billions of charger messages to:
  • Detect patterns that precede failures (e.g., connectivity drift, abnormal session drops).
  • Intervene before drivers are affected (safe, targeted remote reboots; tuned timeouts/configs).
  • Generate human-readable diagnostics for field techs to speed on-site fixes.
• Online vs. offline resilience: Designing for always-connected management while enabling offline authentication (RFID/credit card) with later settlement to reduce single-point failures.
• Tier-1 driver support (in-house): On-shore ChargeLab employees trained on EV charging, sitting near technical teams, improving first-time-driver success and protecting CPO revenue.
• Ops & partnerships: Clear escalation paths to hardware makers and field service partners (like Field Advantage); workflows that avoid unnecessary truck rolls while shortening true MTTR.
• Branding & buyer fit: Off-the-shelf for smaller sites vs. white-label apps, RFID, call flows, and UI for retailers/utilities building branded networks.
• The road ahead: Predictive maintenance, dynamic pricing, grid services, and raising the bar so today’s “good” becomes tomorrow’s minimum.

Transcript

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On this episode of Field Frequency, I sit down with Zak LaFave, CEO of ChargeLab. Zak shares how ChargeLab went from zero reports in 2020 to powering over 15,000 today. We talk about why uptime, reliability, and user experience remain the industry's toughest hurdles. Zak also talks about their technology, which is designed to catch issues before drivers even experience them. If you care about uptime, driver experience, and what it really takes to scale charging, this episode's for you. Let's get into it. Welcome to another episode of Field Frequency. Today I'm joined by Zak Faith of ChargeLab. Zak, so glad to have you here today. Great to be here, Jason, and thanks for the invite. Yeah. Looking forward to our conversation. know it's going to be good just from our discovery conversation around what you're doing over at ChargeLab You've right in, you know, you've been at the intersection of software energy and mobility for years. You started ChargeLab in 2020. Let's talk about experiences, your experiences, what experiences influenced you to launch ChargeLab? What, what has shaped ChargeLab's mission today versus when you started? We've seen a lot of change. You see a lot of change in EV from three years back, you know, 2020 and there's probably even some additional history to that. So, so give us your background. Let's have the origin story. Absolutely. Well, I got involved in electric vehicles all the way back in 2016. And at that time, I really fell in love with the technology. I went for a test ride in obviously Tesla's, but also Nissan Leafs and BMW i3 and the various EVs we had on the road. And I was just blown away that this is not a subpar alternative to a gas vehicle. It's actually a total upgrade. It moves faster. It's silent when you drive it. It's way more efficient. Feels like the future. And so way back in 2016, I developed a lot of conviction that EVs were going to be the future. And I wanted to start a business serving that. And so in 2016, I actually started a different business where we were buying and selling EV chargers and going to properties and helping them put chargers in the ground. But my background was always in computer science. uh I studied computer science and finance. I was involved in some early startup incubators, you know, before charge lab or even before the uh, you know, the first business, EV charging business. but it was kind of through doing that business of selling and installing EV chargers that we, noticed, um, Hey, there's definitely a need for this, but people don't want to just install an EV charger. They also want to monetize it. They want to collect revenue, whether it's from, you know, employees at a workplace or tenants at an apartment building, or it's a public charger. there's actually very real constraints on energy systems. And so you need a way to kind of balance and manage. the load that EVs put on your building. And in general, it was just becoming very clear that the future wasn't dumb EV chargers giving away power for free. It was smart EV chargers where drivers could see in advance, is it available? Is it occupied? What's the price? And then once they get there, they could have a really smooth experience paying for a charging session. And so in 2020, I met my co-founder who was thinking very similarly about the industry. He had sold his previous company. And he had built a software company before. And so we took kind of my experience from the early days of selling and installing EV chargers and his experience and building really scalable software systems. And in 2020, we started ChargeLab. We raised some venture capital funding and we went from really zero ports in the ground in 2020 to building this backend software for managing and monetizing EV chargers. And we now You know, we're, we're, we're now over 15,000 ports under management. and, you know, just growing and, um, kind of adding more capabilities to the software, but also, you know, expanding into different verticals, public charging, multifamily workplace fleet. and like you say, a lot, a lot of things change in this industry and we're trying to stay on top of it and be, uh actually, a leader in causing some of the positive changes that we need to see before EVs and EV charging get to true mass market adoption. It's amazing the shift in perspective of what it looks like. Um, you know, even not just the hardware, but from the, you know, the, the network and management side of the space. And so when you, when you look at the EVSE network management, what are, or where are charge labs, unique value props for operators? Where, where is that clearly seen in most evident? Yeah. So I would break this down into kind of like two categories. And one is what I would call our core product, which we call a CSMS. It's a very unsexy word for a charging station management system. people this a charger management system, a CPMS, a CMS, you know, a backend. Basically it's a software for connecting and managing your EV chargers. And I think we, we offer a lot of advantages and differentiated capabilities and features there. The core value props we bring our monetization, right? We allow you to monetize your EV charger, whether that's by putting a credit card reader on it, which we control and manage, or just by having a QR code, someone can come and use Apple pay and activate a charging session. So we provide the full monetization feature set. We provide the energy management feature set. So we allow buildings with limited electrical capacity to install vastly more EV chargers. And on top of that, we also Um, you know, are interfacing upwards with the grid and, kind of helping utilities run different programs where they want to turn down EV chargers or turn them up at certain times. Um, and then the kind of third software category is just, you know, telemetry and, uh, basically situational awareness. So let's say you have a network of a thousand EV chargers. How many of them are online? How many of them are doing a charging session? Are any of them offline doing them? You need maintenance. Do they need repairs? And this is actually the area where we're starting to bring in AI, which we'll talk about later. But we have a whole AI tool suite for monitoring your network of EV chargers. So I think ChargeLab has one of the most advanced. Certainly we have one of the nicest user interfaces. When a driver pulls up and scans a QR code, they don't have to go through three different logins or kind of juggle a bunch of things. It's as simple as using Apple Pay to start your charging session. I think we have one of the best energy management systems in the industry too. So, you know, there's a software side where, where I think we have a very good product and we're quite differentiated. But the second bucket is, you know, what we've realized in the last five years and, I think, you know, field advantage has realized too, is that EV charging is so much more than just putting a device in the ground and connecting it to some software. You have customer support. So, people who might be new to driving an EV who pull up to the charger and it's their first time using a charger or they might have a Tesla and they pull up to a J 1772 charger and they're not sure does this plug fit into my Tesla? And then you have all the operations, right? Chargers do break in the field and there are problems. And so I really think the second part of our value prop, you the first part is building and supplying a really good software. But the second part is being an operational partner to our networks. So this varies from customer to customer network to network, but we've built out an in-house call center where we take calls from EV drivers. We help those first time Tesla drivers find their adapters so they can use a J1772 plug. We notice when chargers go offline and we call the site host and we take action. We dispatch people like field advantage to go out into the field and fix the EV chargers. I think globally this has shaped up quite differently. think in Europe, the software is just the software and then someone else runs the call center and someone else runs the network. But here in North America, I think the most successful players realize that EV charging is not just the hardware, it's not just the software, it's not just the payment, it's how all of these things work together. And so what we've tried to do with ChargeLab is bring a really compelling end-to-end network operation solution. um To be clear, we are not building a competing charging network. We want to power other charging networks. We have customers like the IV charging network, like Racetrack. They are building their own branded EV charging network. But what we supply them is yes, our software, but a whole suite of network operation services. Again, from picking up the phone for an EV driver to mailing out an RFID card. RFID cards remain very popular, very... reliable way to start a charging session, especially in places with poor internet connectivity. and so, you know, I think where we've found differentiation and success is like one, just having a really well-built, well-designed software, but two, recognizing that sometimes the software is not enough and we're going to have to do some of the operational things, you know, like the call center, like mailing out RFID cards, you know, like building, you know, custom branded apps and things like that for our customers. That's great. picking up the first part of your response around value props, kind of the front end of the support, and taking the latter portion of your response around charge labs value set, specifically the operational and driver support. I want to put a pin in that because I want to revisit that. But kind of taking a step back to the front end of those value props, Most of it obviously they need that full suite of solutions and ChargeLab is fully capable of delivering end-to-end solutions. But going back to the thoughts around the dumb charger early on legacy deployments, you know, it's almost like it's akin to an analog phone. I don't know how old you are, Zak, but I grew up in a day when there were still phones connected to walls with a cord and it was an analog connection. With the springy cord you could twirl around your finger while you're talking to your friends. Yeah. I'm young, but I'm not that young. Okay. Well, you look like a very young man. you can walk around, but you were still tethered to the wall. You were still tethered to a handset and it's almost akin to, you know, there was, there was thoughts early on about set it, forget it, you know, put a chart in the ground. It's, it's, it's passive income. It's, it's not connected. And, know, for, for, for the audience, doesn't understand the difference between non-connected. which is what we're colloquially referring to as a dumb charger. That's a non-networked, know, placed unit. It's all, it is literally akin to the difference between a cell phone and an iPhone. um We can't even imagine what it would be like to have the capabilities of phone. I mean, there's just some things that we've come to assume in cell phone technology that is just expected, whereas we would never expect that on a on a hardwired landline phone because it's just a different technology. we have some lessons from legacy charging deployments around specifically, you know, all chargers, know, DC and then level two charging. was, was thought to be especially level two thought to be set it and forget it a passive income. That was when fast charging was 50 kilowatts. the market learned and as went through the learning curve and the experience of firmware dependencies, networks, O and needs. You've alluded to that, you know, looking at that from the full suite of solutions, charging speeds, the overall, you know, user experience, maybe talk to us about your observations of what the market has learned. What about all those things that I just listed out, those firmware dependencies, subscriptions, all of that, you know, the markets and it's learned through experience. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot to unpack and I think you, you, you ran through it really well. I think starting at the first point, you know, why do you want to get connected smart charger at the end of the day? a charger that's not connected to the internet, um, can't take payments. can't do energy management. You can't have any telemetry on it. So, you know, those are the early days, you know, you, you might have a hotel that put in two chargers and, know, they were free because only a couple of people were driving Teslas. They'd give away, you know, a you know, some electrons every week. that's just not really a viable path for the future. For a couple of reasons, like one, all these hotels that put into, you know, dumb chargers back in the day. Now, you know, those chargers fill up too quickly. They need 10, they need 20 chargers. okay. If you're to have 20 charges at your hotel, you're starting to get to giving away a commercial amount of energy and you're not in the business of giving away, you know, free energy. So you're definitely want a payment system. but also the energy infrastructure in your hotel, and this applies to office buildings and condos, just using a hotel as an example, might not support 20 chargers. So now you need an energy management system where, you know, if five people are plugged in, they can get the full power the charger can allocate. But if all 20 slots are filled, you know, we turn everybody's power down a little bit. And then as a certain vehicle fills up, we reallocate the power to other people. And then also, once you start to get to the point of having 10, 20, 40, 100, chargers in a single building, know, guess what? are, you know, electronic devices and devices do break. And so, you know, you, if you've got 20 chargers at your hotel, there is going to be a need to kind of maintain and be aware of which ones are, starting to get old or, or starting to wear out or, know, someone accidentally clipped the cable with their, with their car. And you want to get early detection signs about what's going on there. So, you know, there's no doubt for everyone in the industry that the future is you know, smart connected chargers. you know, it brings benefits to the site owner who can now generate revenue, but it also brings benefit to EV drivers who can have a higher confidence that when they show up at the hotel, there's going to be a charger that's working cause they can check on their app. yeah. There's 20 chargers there and 12 of them are free and you know, none of them are offline. Um, so it really benefits everyone to have these, these smart connected devices. but you know, that doesn't come without challenges, right? Like there's another piece of the puzzle, which is you have a software, you have a internet connection either over 4G or over wifi. So that adds complexity. And I think what we're dealing with now, frankly, at the industry is there's no debate about whether or not chargers are going to be smart and able to take payments. We've, we've, that ship has totally sailed. The problem now is a lot of the gen one kind of smart chargers that we're putting the ground, we're maybe not installed with the right network connectivity parameters. Maybe they weren't the right hardware or firmware version, or maybe the software developer didn't take the care and kind of building the software product that we did. And so you have, I think, a bit of a reliability crisis in public charging where there's a lot of smart chargers, kind of what I would call Gen 1 smart chargers out there that just don't meet the kind of reliability needs of a growing EV industry going forward. But, but without a doubt, you know, we, need smart chargers. need monetize chargers. You know, we want to incentivize people and buildings to put in more EV chargers because they can make money on them. And more EV chargers means it makes it easier for the EV driver. And ultimately that's, that's kind of our mission is, is how do we, you know, how do we help building scale their infrastructure and how do we make it easier for EV drivers to, use that infrastructure? that's, said a lot in that, and there's a lot to impact there. You know, one of the things I want to key in on is the, um, the monetize monetization factor, you know, early on chargers were deployed as a free amenity, you know, to your earlier point, you know, a little bit of energy here and there is okay. But then once you get into that, uh, scale distribution of energy, you know, you're, you're giving away. electrons. And so that speaks to the value of ChargeLab's platform with the energy management, where if you have 20 chargers, you're not worried about the operational expense because you're controlling that operational expense through the proper disbursement of that energy through an intelligently managed power distribution system. directing those electrons the right way, intelligent way to offset costs from an operational standpoint. You also, you also mentioned reliability. Reliability, obviously an uptime is an ever present subject in EV charging. It's, it's, it's all, all over the place. Cause that's what we, it's, speaks to the experience both of the driver and the operator, the, the CPO uptime reliability. That's CPOs, you know, goals, but then from a driver standpoint, the charger working from your vantage. point, why hasn't this problem been solved at scale? Why are we still dealing with chargers that are undependable? What's going to bring meaningful change? Yeah, well, let's kind of start with the facts and the data. And there's a good Harvard meta analysis of this. There was also a study around the San Francisco Bay area. as of call it 12 months ago, one in five attempted public charging sessions failed. So about 20 % of attempted charging sessions across all networks, all vehicles, was unsuccessful. Uh, and that's kind of crazy to think about, like if you're driving a, a, a gas car, you know, I for many decades drove, um, drove a gas vehicle before I got an EV. Um, and, um, you know, you just couldn't imagine if like one in five times you went to the gas pump, it just didn't work. Like it happened, you know, maybe once a year, right. Um, but, but, but 20 % failure rate is, far too high. Um, We also have data on, the root cause and, the, biggest root cause of failures are number one connectivity issues. So you have a charger that's supposed to be connected to the internet, but it's not. And so if the charger is supposed to get a signal from a server that says, Hey, this driver has paid you, we should start charging them. And the charger simply is not connected to that server. it's you're going to have a failed charging session. and then the other. problem you unfortunately have is actually a lot of kind of firmware issues, miscommunication between the backend and the charger. We have this great open protocol in the industry called OCPP, the open charge point protocol, which is used by software platforms like ours to connect to hardware built by a ton of manufacturers like, you know, ABB Siemens, wallbox, Zorova, you you list them. but you know, this was a A first time protocol when it rolled out, we're now a couple versions into it. the latest published version is 2.1, but the vast majority of charges are still running on 1.6. It's not really a fault of the protocol though. It's, it's more the implementation. have different backend softwares that interpret parts of the protocol differently and different hardware is interpreted, interpreted differently. And so all of these things put together lead to. You know, a bunch of, of issues when you try to, kind of go do a smart charging session, but I wouldn't, I, you know, I kind of went technical first. Maybe I should, I should have started at the high level. So I'll zoom back out to the high level. okay. Zak's explained the technical reason you have connectivity issues. have firmware software miscommunication, you know, driver error. They plug in the cable before they start the session or they start the session before plugging in. And there's a timeout between when they activate and when they plug in the car, you have all of these issues, but what's the like. What would I explain to someone outside of the industry? Why is the reliability issues in the industry? It's because it's a new and immature industry, right? And, you know, if you think about kind of, again, taking the smartphone analogy, like our smartphones are crazy today. They have accelerometers. They can like, you know, play video games. can do virtual reality, like all from your little smartphone, but like, You know, you and I remember when the first smartphones came out, the first iPhone was, was pretty magical. Didn't have a front facing camera. didn't have any apps. only had the apps that Apple put on it. So like by today's standards, it was just like, you know, very, there were a lot of things to build out there. Right. And you had that one iPhone came out that had the kind of like 4g gate. Um, you know, if you held the phone in a certain way, the antenna would, would, would not connect properly. And so that's where we're at with the EV charging industry. It's a new technology. There's growing pains. Having said that, I think because we have this data, because we know why the charging sessions are failing, it's on us as an industry to provide solutions. And I'm happy to give a couple of examples of what we do at ChargeLab. One, on that connectivity issue, like A, we work really hard with our install partners to improve connectivity and uh folks like FieldAdvantage. do that as well, installing wifi boosters and single boosters and making sure the charts come online. But we also work with hardware manufacturers to make chargers work offline, right? We don't think a charger needs to be connected to the internet constantly. Like if you have a way to authenticate offline, whether that's an RFID card or a, or a credit card reader, or even a kind of near field Bluetooth connection between your phone and the charger, we're pushing to have more kind of redundancy for offline. When it comes to the communication between hardware and software, it's a new industry. looks like you see all these vehicles flooding onto the road. You're like, my God, there's going to be a big opportunity here. And so you have a bunch of people who come to market with cheap software solutions, cheap hardware solutions, and kind of mush it together. And that relies at least a lot of unreliability. Here at ChargeLab, we have a physical lab. It's actually right behind me. You can see over my shoulder. uh one of our test vehicles where we test dozens of models of EV chargers. And every time there's a firmware update, we go through the firmware update, run it against dozens of test cases. We write up a report, we send it to the manufacturer. We work collaboratively hand in hand. I mean, I think one of the biggest problems in this industry is folks who point fingers and, you know, it's kind of notorious in the charging industry. But like, if you have an issue with your charging network, your hardware guy is going to say, it's the software's fault. And your software guy is going to say, it's the hardware's fault. And here at ChargeLab, we just realized that that's not a viable path forward. So instead, we bring in all of our hardware partners. We bring their hardware into our lab. We recognize that sometimes there's things that we can change in our system to improve the reliability of a certain charger. And then there's other times where we say, hey, we think there's a bug in this firmware. Why don't you guys take a look? And then they go and make a revision. So there are very real things you can do to improve reliability and we're doing them. But I think it starts with an awareness. And then, you know, the second step I think is for customers to demand this. Like when you're building a network of EV chargers, if you are a gas station that's rolling out your first 20, your first 30 EV chargers, you know, ask your vendors, hey, how do you do integration testing? What is your interoperability uptime? What are the performance? Can you show me kind of results of of how you've improved reliability in the past and not just taking it for granted because we are still in that early industry and you really got to be careful with selecting the partners who understand the underlying problems and are doing things to fix them. Yeah, that's, uh, that's, that's right. And the, the, the forward charge lab is clearly forward looking thinking in terms of, of holistically for the audience. It's listing that may not understand all, it may not even really factored in all that goes into EV charger reliability. You, you, said a lot, you know, starting off with that stat about 20 % charge, you know, successful charge session queues up. So So basically 80 % is going off, 20 % is not working. you know, kind of looking at that through the framework of petroleum, you know, retail fueling. That, you know, another factor of that is even if, even if the number was the same on petroleum fueling, there's more fueling points at a fuel, at a fuel site. And if not at that particular site across the street, there's another gas station and down the street, both directions, there's another gas station. that aren't there for the EV drivers to look at how, you know, that 20 % gets down to 20 to 10 % to 5%. Um, you know, cause I would say, you know, I come from the petroleum retail fueling world and uptime in that realm from holistically, when you look at all the fuel points in the U S it's 99%, you know, an aspirational goal of EV charging is, is, you know, we hear of 98 % and those are standards set, you know, through funding, know, opportunities, public funding resources, et cetera. And that's the goal. when we really look at what successful charging is and what, you know, that 20%, it's, it's, it paints a darker picture because you alluded to it when there's a lot of friction points in what a charging session is, the car communicating with the charger. the payment rails associated with the credit card reader, the backend network connectivity, all of those, and you know, the hardware fails. And like you said, there's finger pointing going on. so when you, you know, you've got connectivity issues, you've got where did the transaction not happen and all these. so charge lab is, is addressing that holistically by having the lab that you mentioned, bringing in the hardware, bringing in the vehicle, because there's all these changes. so it's, it's kind of like. You know, it's interesting that we're talking about the importance of connectivity and a network to manage the chargers. And you, you, you clarified that you, you qualify, said it's, it's not necessarily required. There can be offline chargers with RFID or credit card readers, but the thing is for the audience that doesn't understand all of those moving pieces or maybe they're even technologically savvy there. How can you have a connected charger? I can have a disconnected charger, but what about its firmware updates? It's kind like a cell phone that when Apple's pushing a new iOS, you're not connected to your cellular provider. How are you going to get that firmware? Absolutely. mean, and to be clear on that point, like we really, we believe these chargers need to be connected as much as possible. But when you look at the failure modes, given that connectivity is a large one, you want to say, hey, if, if, if for whatever reason, the cell tower is too far away, things like that, if for whatever reason, this charger drops offline an hour a day, how do we provide, you know, seamless backup to make sure that people can charge that 24 hours a day? but we do want that charger spending most of its time online so we can monitor it. even when we talk about offline payment with RFID cards and credit cards, that can allow you to initiate an offline payment, but you have to reconnect at some point to go settle that, right? You can collect credit card information offline or collect the RFID tag offline, but you've got to get back online to settle that payment. But no, I mean, I think... I think Nevi's goals uh or Nevi's enforcement of reliability is very noble and it's a good initiative. But at the end of the day, I think it's the market that's going to drive it. You people are going to use the charging networks that work 99 % of the time, and they are not going to use the charging networks that work 75 % of the time. And again, this comes back to growing pains. We're still at that early stage of the industry where, you know, the only charger, you know, by your kids elementary school where you're picking them up. might be that network that works 75 % of the time or 50 % of the time. And so I think the underperforming networks are still getting artificially lifted by a lack of alternatives, right? If all I can charge at is the network that only works 50 % of the time, I'm still going to occasionally charge there. But as the industry grows and more chargers come out, the bar is just going to keep raising. And all of a sudden the folks who can't deliver reliability are going to start seeing their revenue declining. while the folks who can deliver reliability are going to see the revenue increasing. And I think that's probably the biggest opportunity for network operators. you know, and, in a world where there's always a cheaper EV charger that you can import from overseas, and there's always a cheaper software where charge lab really focuses is on the operators who want to be delivering that 99 % uptime and who are able to pay a little bit more for hardware, a little bit more for software. but actually make more money because, you know, when you operate a public charger, every hour of downtime is potentially lost revenue. And so, you know, we're maturing as an industry and we'll get there. But I think there's, you know, you go back to any early industry and there are people, you know, complaining about internet speeds, people complaining about, you know, Imagine how people complain about their cell phones today when they're driving out in the country and they lose cell reception. Like I remember the first cell phone I had, it was connected like half the time at best. Like it was always on, you know, connect cause there weren't enough cell towers. There wasn't enough infrastructure. It wasn't built out yet. So, you know, I think we have to have a positive posture here and, and at the same time it creates opportunities. Like I think what field advantage is doing in the world of EV going out to maintain, um, and, and help do the O and on the EV chargers. just didn't exist as a need, you five years ago, because everyone thought EV chargers were going to be set in and forget it. But now the kind of tier one operators recognize, Hey, I need someone going out and checking my chargers. I need a 24 hour SLA. If a charger goes down, you know, I need to be able to go out and swap a SIM card. that fixes it. and I think the market's just going to push everyone in the direction of, of better services and more reliability. yeah, we're going that way. I just saw it, know, firsthand with a customer of ours, their co-op utility service provider covering a certain area of, and they have chargers distributed throughout their service territory for customers. And one particular charger down, obviously, you know, this is a revenue stream for them. They, you know, they're netting some revenue and this particular charger was was somewhat abandoned by their network, uh, for whatever reason and picked up by another one. uh, you know, we had, we had a technician out there and the charger had been down for a year and, uh, technician was out there and resolved the issue in, you know, two hours, you know, hour and a half, two hours. It was back online and resolved and feedback from the customer. The owner was, was this, it's like, this charger has been down for over a year. Um, we typically, from this parking space that it serves, Um, it was a DC fast charger, you know, legacy one, so only one outlet per per parking space. so this, the feedback was this particular parking space. We, we get, you know, three to $400 a month from this parking space or did, and because of where it was at and other factors. And it's been revenue that was lost for almost 13 months. And as a result of, know, just that service, um, need that wasn't being connected. That wasn't being, there wasn't some intentionality. wasn't something, you know, a thought process around how to keep the chargers not only online, but staying online through preventative maintenance, other factors. so, you know, that a pain point in the reliability of chargers, the uptime of chargers is, is, the connectivity. And so there are, there's technology to help connectivity and, and, and get ahead of problems before they start. And, One of those actually is through AI. AI is an operational lever when it comes to improving site reliability. ChargeLab is integrating AI as a part of its solutions. so you have product Spark AI, I believe is the name of it. And Spark AI is about proactive monitoring of the EV chargers. it's not only just someone in a room looking for... red lights to appear because of charter, but you're leveraging technology. That's what Spark AI does. And so it's, it's about proactively monitoring the network. Can you speak to me on how, how does AI integrate into charge labs platform and what is it doing to improve site reliability? Yeah. Um, I'm well, I'm glad you, brought it up, Jason. We're very proud of spark, which is our AI, you know, agent and product at charge lab. You know, I think the first thing I'll say is every company is integrating AI now for content creation and for, customer support, you know, it's, it's not going to be rare in the EV charging industry or elsewhere to interact with the support agent. That is an AI that actually knows more about EV chargers or knows more about a certain topic than. the average outsource call center agent. And then of course we build a lot of software and so we use all of the AI tools. So I think a lot of our competitors will use AI in those kinds of ways that we also do to make our coding more efficient and find bugs and things like that. What's unique about Spark, it's a notch above it in terms of kind of technical R &D that we required to get there, is we built a fully custom data pipeline and applied machine learning techniques, but the product is our AI system and our agent that is looking at all the messages that come in from all the EV chargers on our network. there are thousands of messages per day across tens of thousands of EV chargers. And this ultimately adds up to in the billions of messages per year. um And so it's not feasible for any human to kind of sift through those messages or find patterns, but we've built an AI system that can. And so what we're doing is we're proactively looking for signals from EV chargers that indicate that connectivity is poor, that there are more failed sessions than we would like to see on this particular type of hardware on this particular firmware. And and then we also make that kind of human digestible human diagnosable. So a customer using, for example, our analyze with spark feature can go pick an EV charger and say, you know, tell me the last three days or the last 24 hours of history with this charger. And we'll go through all of the logs and explain, Hey, this is what's working, but we're seeing certain issues here, here, and here with your, your EV charger. but I think the intelligence and the monitoring is just the first step. real Holy grail here is interventions. where we want the AI to intervene before an EV driver actually has an issue. And so what we're doing today is, you get very, very complex software systems. have these amazing laptops that can do crazy things that a generation ago we never could dreamed of. You've got your iPhone that can do all of this stuff. But if your iPhone stops working or gets really slow or uh Something's just off with your iPhone. What do you do, Jason? Turn it off, turn it back on. turn it off and turn it back on again. And so it's the same with an EV charger. Actually the number one intervention for an EV charger that's getting in a funky state or is not accepting transactions that it should or is ending sessions early is turn it off and back on again. And so what we're doing with our AI is we're looking across the network and finding chargers that could benefit from a proactive reboot. And we have seen a measurable increase in reliability from this because we're able to essentially stop problems before they happen. and this again is also quite technical because in a world of thousands of connected IOT devices, rebooting a charger is not a zero cost endeavor. Every time you reboot a charger, there's a risk that it doesn't come back online, right? Depending on the network configuration or the, the SIM card or like the wind. Um, you know, if you did your rain dance or not, there's always a risk that a charger doesn't come back online. So we're trying to apply intelligence to say, A, you know, which chargers here could benefit from a reboot, but B, is it safe to do a reboot on this charger? And we're having really good results with that. But it's not just turning chargers back on, off and back on again. There's also, uh especially on DC fast chargers, a lot of kind of configuration parameters and the configuration parameters define things like how long before an attempted charging session times out. So if you've got a really heavy CCS cable and you go tap the credit card reader, you go tap the RFID reader, and let's say you're not the biggest person in the world, you take that CCS Solster, you're opening your car, you're getting it in there, that session can actually time out between when you tap your RFID card or your credit card and you plug in your car. And so what we'll do is we'll go through and look, hey, have we maxed out the, know, for various reasons we might not want it be the max, but have we given what we deem to be the ideal kind of timeout session. And, you know, all of this was very labor intensive before. Again, we're talking about billions of messages. It's not even possible for a human to sift through it. But now we're automating it all with AI and with Spark. And I think we talked a little bit about this in our offline conversations, Jason, but like our goal is ultimately not to replace technicians and O Like there is a very real need for folks to roll trucks, go inspect EV chargers, clean them off, change filters, fix broken parts with spare parts. But what we wanna do is we wanna empower the technicians, A, to not be doing really basic things like turning the charger back off and on again. That's not a good use of their time. That's not a good use of the client's budget. It's not a good use of real resources overall. but also to empower technicians so that when they do go to a site, they have a very, very deep analysis from Spark that says, hey, we started noticing connectivity issues with the Charger three weeks ago. We think something probably changed in the cell network that it was connecting to. We also noticed that utilization had gone down, so maybe another competing charging station opened up nearby. Maybe you should review pricing to make sure you're still competitive. We want to give the network operators and the technicians all the tools necessary. And we think AI can just be a great partner for our network operators, for our technicians, and for everybody in the ecosystem, even the hardware manufacturers too. Yeah, the, um, you know, had a lot of thoughts as you were, as you were talking there, the, you know, with the ladder being the, the, the under the reduced utilization, what has changed is the experience. I often wondered, you know, as an EV driver, there was a point in time in my life where I was dependent on public charging. I didn't have at home charging because I lived in a multifamily community. And as much as I tried to pressure them and the other EV drivers there tried to pressure them to put in charge. weren't interested in doing it. so, you know, I, along with those in my community were dependent on public charging. And so it got to the point where we absolutely knew where we could go and where not to go and where we went that we knew we could go and get a charging session. It was going to be anyone's guess as if when you got there, there was a free charger and who got there to wait for you before and is waiting, who got there before you and is waiting to use a charger. who's next in line, everyone's depending on goodwill, all of those things. And so that's just one thing that is experiential when it comes to reliability and charging. And so take that and throw in the fact that you've waited to use a charger and you get up and you don't work. Now you also talked about, you know, false positives around, you know, I've scanned my RFID, I've scanned my, you know, I've used my credit card reader, I'm trying to get my adapter plugged in or I'm... don't have an adapter, but I'm trying to get the cable into the inlet. And you've created this false positive that says, Hey, this charging session didn't, didn't go through it. Didn't authenticate because it timed out. Well, why did it time out? it timed out because someone was trying to manhandle a really heavy cable and get it into their car and get it seated properly. So there was true connectivity. It timed out. And so there's nothing wrong with the charger. This was an experience that, that, that sent that, that didn't happen. So You know, ChargeLab is looking at this holistically and Spark AI, the value behind it is it's not just trying to respond to needs, although that's a part of its value, but it's also taking a step back and looking at data, looking at the charger. Hey, this charger's derated a couple of times. Perhaps that signals a module failure. Did it trigger a code? You know, you made the example of just power cycle charger, you know, and, you know, I like that you tied it. you know, teet it up with my phone. What happens when my phone starts bugging out? I'm trying to close apps because I know it's, you know, running hard with all those that are open. I close them, but as a general rule, I just power it down, restart it. You know, is there a risk of data being used to the operator in that power cycle? Is there, is it, you know, what are the, what are the unintended consequences of just power cycling? That's not a solution. It's looking, using AI to look at it. uh both historical data informing what's happening right now and then predictive about what we can different route we can go. Yeah, it's It's a complex issue. have to apply a lot of intelligence. Like the other example, yeah, I gave is that you can increase, session reliability by increasing the timeout window. So people have more time to fill their computer or their, their cable, sorry. but if you increase that window too long, you end up leaving kind of sessions for so long that someone else could come in and plug in. And then you have a whole other problem on your hands. So none of these, none of these solutions are, know, just do this or just do that. It's really about being engaged with. customer, being engaged with the data and making informed decisions and also realizing that the decision that we make in August 2025 is going to be vastly different than the one we make in August 2027 and August 2030. so at the end of the day, think one kind of theme where we've alluded to and we've talked about is back in the day, people thought you threw a couple of EV chargers outside your building and you put it on autopilot and We would like to provide that service to, to, to customers, to buildings that if they just want to put it on autopilot, they can. But the only reason they can do that is because folks like charge lab and field advantage are monitoring their network for them, making things sure things stay up to date and firmware stays up to date. so I think like any other network of devices, like vending machines, like, you know, parking meters, like any of these things, it is an active management. And we can use AI and software to take a lot of the manual steps out of that. But whether it's a human or whether it's an AI, you need to be actively monitoring and managing, you know, this network of devices. Absolutely. Picking up on my, you know, reference to my experience being dependent on public charging. You know, now in a home have, you know, have a charger at home. So I'm, charging at home and then also charging in the marketplace if needed. But I, charger do you have? I have a destination charger for the Tesla and then I actually have an old Nissan charger for my Leaf. That's the like L one one. Yeah. L one is underrated. People don't know how much you can get out of an L one charger. It's, know, for a lot of people, it does the job. Yeah, well, and it works. It works because the Leaf has 215 miles of range. So it's just for tooling around San Antonio. don't, I don't even try to take it up to Austin because I have, but you know, again, depending on public charging, Chattemo is the protocol. that's the, that's a whole nother dynamic. know, I've, I've, you know, going back to experiences in public charging in a Leaf, I pull up to uh a bank of chargers and yeah, there's probably one Chattemo plug out there, but the driver and the CC with the CCS protocol is parked there. So I'm still waiting. There's a bunch of available chargers that I can't use. They're, they're immaterial to me. And so, you know, there's, there's been that experience. And so, you know, and I'm in the industry, so I know how to navigate through all that, but you know, new EV drivers, people to move into, buying an EV and becoming an EV driver, all of those experiences, it's like they don't even know what they don't know yet. They don't know what that experience looks like. And so when we were talking about Charge Labs, know, value sets and all the things that you offer as solutions, you had mentioned a tier one driver support, because that speaks to what, you know, what we're dealing with at the charger. so, you know, getting into the thoughts around UX and driver support. Charge lab you mentioned you've invested in onshore tier one driver support. So you've got folks locally here taking the calls of the drivers when there's a problem. How does that change the driver experience? One and then two, how does that change the operator, the owner operator of those chargers? Their ROI compared to other models. So the question is, you've got this tier one driver support that onshore that ChargeLab provides, someone to call when there's a problem. That's got to create value for the owner operator, and it certainly creates value for the driver. Speak to that. What's that look like? Yeah, well, we'll look two years ago, we were like a lot of early folks in the industry, a lot of our competitors, we built software. That was our core business. People said, Hey, we need someone to pick up the phones when, they're at the charger. said, no problem. We're we'll hire an outsource call center to do that. And, and that's what we did, you know, for the first number of years of the business. but we, found out is everything we've talked about. This is an early industry, there's technical complexity and we really needed to up level what we were offering. So uh just under two years ago, we made the decision to bring that all in-house and build out a call center, not only that we control and is fully in-house, but that are full-time ChargeLab employees. when you are using one of our customers networks, whether it's Ivy or Racetrack or others, this is a service we provide and you're not going to land on the phone with somebody. who's at an outsource call center that supports EV charging in addition to, you know, warranties for dishwashers and a whole bunch of other things, you're going to actually speak to a charge lab employee who's been trained specifically on EV charging. You know, more than just the specific training and the vetting we do to bring people onto this team, they're actually in the same office as a lot of our technical support, hardware integration folks. And so it's literally a, you know, a 20 foot. walk to say, Hey, I'm on the phone with a customer. He's having trouble with this kind of charger. Like, you know, what do we know about the firmware? And, we've just seen an absolute, you know, explosion in, in, in kind of CSAT results since bringing the call center in-house, um, you know, much better results with the, the in-house call center. but I think to your question, it also, um, we see a direct path to. you know, monetization for our customers, know, CPOs, meaning charge point operators, meaning gas stations and networks who run public chargers are going to get more revenue when people have a really good first time experience where someone on the phone is really helpful and walks them through exactly what they need to find out. Or when they have an issue and we resolve it really efficiently, they're going to keep coming back for more on that network. And frankly, a lot of the calls we get our first time drivers, right? So, you know, I think networks when choosing, Hey, am I going to pay charge lab or another vendor to do tier one support? Or am I just going to put up a website that says frequently asked questions, you know, scan the QR code if you have an issue, but no human to talk to. it's, it's not necessarily a forever cost. A lot of the time it is, Hey, this is my first time using XYZ network. Can you walk me through the steps? Can you explain what I can and can't do? Can you explain if I should download the app or if I should just use the QR code and Apple pay? That's an option we provide at charge lab. You don't have to download the app. You can just scan the QR code and use Apple pay. but, yeah, I think we've seen a real ROI for our customers of, of, of, you know, this in-house support that can just do a little bit more and. Um, look, there's, there's great outsource call centers all around the world and they do really good work and a lot of good agencies you can work with. But I think when you're in a nascent industry, like we are, we just thought it was really important to get super close to the end users and have, you know, full-time charge lab employees interacting with EV drivers every day. And then bringing that feedback back to our operations team, to our product team, and to the rest of the organization. Well, you know, and this is not to take away from offshore solutions. Like you said, that they have their own values, but where charge lab is differentiating itself is you've got this tier one driver support. You've got these charge lab employees. They're working with a driver to, to work through a problem, to get them connected and charging. If there's something that's technical charge lab, charge lab employee is going to go over to the support side. side and get granular around what the problem might be and get that driver closer to charging or whatever. Whereas in other solutions, could be that the tier one driver support is offloaded to a call center that is not in the industry. They're answering calls for other types of businesses within other types of industries. And that core technical knowledge is not there. And so it's probably going to be an ingesting of the problem. documenting of it, if they can't work through some simple workflow, they're going to just point them to another charger or they're going to have to be turned away. so that, you know, that's where operators see that value. You've mentioned racetrack. Racetrack is a, is an example of a petroleum retailer. They're, you know, headquartered in Atlanta. you know, have located 900 locations, I believe, maybe, maybe even exceeded that. You know, when I know from, from their perspective, they want their guests to pull up and think of the EV charging that they offer the same way as their guests. whether it's gasoline, when they pull up to a racetrack site, they don't look at the manufacturer gas pump. They just think of the gas pump as racetrack. If there's a problem at that fuel pump, they're probably going to move down to the next, to the next pump and use it and move on with their day. They're never going to report it to the, to the site. They're not going to go in and talk to the, you know, the support staff inside, inside the store. They're going to do all that. With ChargeLab solutions, Racetrack doesn't have to worry about that because they have a problem. If they have a problem at the charger, they can call in and get solutions right there in real time. that's a differentiator. that is what's going to help drive that uptime and reliability and drive the ROI that all CPOs are looking to attain. One of the things with AI and addressing problems proactively, that's great. Talking about remote fix versus, you I can't resolve this remotely, we're going to have to engage with the service. How has ChargeLab approached the balance between remote resolution, onsite intervention? What's kind of the watershed moment for that? Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's a matter of triaging, right? If we can fix it remotely quickly, we'll do it. but we have a whole escalation path. Um, and we escalate to a couple of different points. Like if we think that there's fundamentally something wrong with the firmware or hardware, we actually sometimes escalate to the manufacturer. and we work with them with our lab. Like we talked about, if this is an onsite issue, we escalate to the O and partner and, I think that the biggest kind of thing to highlight here is our best operators are engaged with a, you know, field service provider. Field advantage is one of them. Some of our best customers work with field advantage, but there's other providers, right? Um, you know, we work a lot with charger help. Um, you know, we were working with new companies in Canada doing this. I think it's really important if you want to be a tier one EV charging network operator in 2025 and going forward, you. Obviously need a great partner on the software side and you know, give us a call. Always happy to talk. you need to pick the right hardware. but you also need to be engaged, um, either with your own internal staff that can do that. And I think there are some entities that can, you know, that can do their, um, kind of own internal technician, but most CPOs are going to benefit from partnering with someone like a field advantage. and then, I mean, I think the, the, the last piece of the puzzle is just setting up between your. call center, your backend software provider, your O and provider, making sure the workflows are clear because, you know, our relationship with field advantage is you guys want to know as soon as we hear about an issue from an EV driver that might need to be serviced. But you also want to respect the customer's needs to not pay for unnecessary site visits. And so we have a checklist. Hey, did we try all of these things? Okay. If not, if we tried these things and it didn't work, then we're sending out field advantage and you know, we make the customer aware and, you know, once field advantage has done your work, you send a report back. Hey, here's what we found. We resolved it. You know, we swapped this part. We, you know, change this power module. and, you know, I think that's just what the industry needs going forward is this, this collaboration. Like I think it's important to recognize that nobody's going to do everything end to end, right? It is. At this, in this day and age and EV churches is not viable to build the hardware software call center, you know, technicians. But if you have an open and collaborative approach like we do, and like field advantage does, you know, you can partner, um, you know, field advantage provides field service for customers who use charge lab software. And you provide field service for people who use our competitors software. And, know, frankly. I hope one day we get a chance to win over those customers with our software. But in the meantime, I'm just glad that those chargers are getting the maintenance and the support that they need because ultimately, I benefit from my competitors having more uptime because the industry benefits and people have put more trust in electric vehicles and public charging. so, the more CPOs who engage real O service plans, like I think it's only a benefit for the industry. Yeah, you put your finger on a, on, on the pulse of one of the problems, in the spaces is everyone values vertical integration. There's values to that, but there has to be some lanes you have to have, but you have to be in the right lane for you doing the right thing. Not, not overextending yourself because we've seen companies tried to do it all. And it's like in some areas you're winning and some areas you're failing, failing. could be critical and impacting it'll eventually impact where you're winning. And so it's. It's fine in the right lane and there's you're right. takes collaboration to be successful. You spoke about, you know, operators picking the right hardware, being intentional, not just picking whatever's cheapest, but picking what is right. Picking what's going to have some long-term durability and proper support system. To that end, when we move in from the hardware over to the software side, ChargeLab has solutions whenever it comes to maybe off the shelf versus white labeled solutions. What, How does the operator know what to pick? What drives an operator? You know, a turnkey network solution, services product, customized white label solution. There's, gotta be different needs for different segments. It's gotta be different, you know, goals. Yeah, it's a great call out and we serve ultimately we serve both. we have customers who just have a couple of chargers in apartment building condo building. You know, we're literally working with the apartment building owner or the condo board. You know, they don't need branding on it. They just need a solution that works. And so they can buy the charge lab product off the shelf or frankly, they can buy from one of our turnkey partners. We move into the white label. We provide white labels to other folks who go do the turnkey service. So you can access, um you know, ChargeLab services by buying from TurnOn Green or Intertie or EV Start or, you know, a bunch of these great turnkey operators that often have specific niches for multifamily or fleets or things like that. But then the flip side of it is you kind of come into the world of EV charging networks. And like you said, you know, a shell is going to want a branded kind of shell experience. A racetrack is going to want a branded racetrack experience. You know, again, we talked about this offline, you know, when you go to a shell or a racetrack, you don't see advertising for Gilbarco. mean, most people listening to this podcast, like don't don't know that Gilbarco is the leading manufacturer of gas pumps in the world, but you don't hear about Gilbarco because you show up at a shell and it's wrapped in shell, right? That's ultimately the same kind of service that we, um, you know, we want to provide. Uh, and so if you are. building a network of EV chargers or if you're starting an EV charging business where it's important to be branded, ChargerLite provides a full suite of white labeling. So, you know, the charger obviously will be wrapped with your brand. When people scan the QR code, it'll show your brand. We can build a mobile app. So there's a, you know, a mobile app that features all of your brand assets. We do branded RFID cards and even our call center is branded. So for white label customers, we're not picking up the phone as... you know, hey, this is charge lab or picking up the phone as, hey, this is EV charging support for XYZ brand. um How can we help you? And and uh that also comes with a lot of customization, because I think you when you get into these larger brands again, you know, I'll just I'll just use Shell as an example that is not our customer. But, you know, Shell has a very, you know, specific global guideline of how you speak to customers, how you're messaging. you know, works. So we work with similar brands like that. And we customize our messaging, knowing that, you know, this brand might want their customers to be called customers. Another brand might want them to be called users. Another man might want them to be called drivers. And so we can go down and get quite, quite technical in how we, customize all of that. But I think for, for the folks, you know, listening to this, I think you, you know, if you're an individual building, a library, a small kind of municipality, you likely don't need to invest in white labeling. can just choose a good provider and get the charges in the ground and provide the service. If you are a traditional fuel retailer coming into the EV charging world, there's a lot of benefits to continuing to push your brand forward in the EV charging apps and services. And so I'd really encourage you to oh speak to ChargeLab or speak to our competitors about white labeling. Because like you said, Jason, both solutions exist. And then I think field advantage is kind of like the ultimate white labeler because you're the ghost in the machine, right? You guys are the agents who come and fix things and make them work. But at the end of the day, what are you fixing? You're fixing a shell EV charger, a racetrack EV charger, a utility branded EV charger. And I think it's just important that folks in the industry know that we're at a point in this industry where you can build your brand, you can build your vision without doing everything in-house, right? If you want a branded solution or if you want technicians, they don't have to be your own technicians. There's very qualified companies like Field Advantage, Charger Help, so many others that can come and provide this service and really help your brand achieve its goals. Well, Zak, this has been a great conversation. We've covered a lot of ground from a closing standpoint because we've been going for a little bit here. It's been great. You've shared a lot of knowledge with the audience and I'm sure there'll be some inquiries around it because there's a lot to unpack in what was discussed here. You shared a lot with us and it's really good. know, kind of closing thoughts when we're looking at the future of charging. When looking at the intersection of that with AI or any other technologies, answer this however you feel best. How is ChargeLab positioning itself to lead in this space? When you're looking ahead, maybe you frame it up in with the text of AI and the Spark AI product or however you'd, but what role do you think like AI will play in predictive maintenance? Where we going to, where do we get to the next level when it comes to utilization, predictive maintenance, dynamic pricing grid services? all the parts and pieces that are needed for a smooth operation. How is ChargeLab positioning to lead there? Yeah, a great question. Well, look, we're very privileged where we're well funded. We have great customers and we're quickly becoming one of the larger backend software providers in North America. And I really think, you know, that brings a great responsibility, you know, being one of the larger and increasingly one of the more well established players in the industry. The onus is on us to push innovation, right? When you're the smallest guy in the room, the startup, you know, it's okay to be scrappy and kind of copy what other folks are doing and do it a little bit leaner and meaner. But when you become more, more established, I think you have an onus to really set the bar. And that's what we've done with Spark, right? Nobody else was building this. Um, and, and the industry hadn't, when we started working on Spark, I would say the industry hadn't really fully crystallized its ideals around, uh, ideas around reliability, but we were already noticing a worrying trend in reliability. So we took it upon ourselves to say, What can we do to apply the latest technologies to really improve the experience for site operators, for network operators, and for EV drivers? And I really think the onus is on us to continue pushing innovation. We do have an in-house AI team, which not every EV charging company has, not on the hardware or service side, and few on the software side do. So I think, again, with... you know, with the trust of our customers and the trust of the industry comes great responsibility. And we really want to do right by the industry and make the right investments and, hopefully raise the bar. mean, the best outcome for me is that our work raises the standards for others. The fact that we have a QR code that you just scan, click Apple pay and pay. I hope that makes all of our competitors think about their payment systems and making it easier and smoother. The fact that we have have spark and we can do better automated maintenance and increase uptime. really hope that, you know, frankly, I hope that five years from now, charge labs reliability today is unacceptable. Right. I, I, are well above that kind of 80 % success rate uh that we see in the industry. But we're not at the 99 % rate yet because there's a lot of complexity and connectivity issues and all these different things. And I hope that, you know, five years from now, where we are today is just not considered good enough anymore. And hopefully we've moved to a higher level and the rest of the industry has too. But I think that's our ambition. You know, we don't want to just kind of be another provider. We want to be innovating and pushing the envelope and, you know, bringing better solutions to both site operators and EV drivers. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you, Zak, for being on field frequency. This has been a fascinating conversation. Appreciate you sharing knowledge with us. Appreciate you sharing what ChargeLab is doing in this space to make this space a better place, reliability, uptime, all those things that we need to have a good experience in the transition to electric mobility. So thanks for being with us on field frequency, Zak. Really appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks Jason. And thanks for the great work you are doing. know field advantage is a big business outside of EV charging and you're really pushing, pushing the envelope on, becoming more involved in the EV charging side. So, you know, I love to see it and love the work you're doing as well. Thank you.