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“We’re not here to replace people, we’re here to make them more influential and powerful,” says CEO Hans Galland. (John Sommers II for Transport Topics)

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SAN DIEGO — Technology developer Beyond Trucks introduced a dispatch planning system that integrates AI-backed technology directly into its transportation management platform, and that features a natural language interface that the company said gives users the ability to verbally adjust route plans in real time.

“In trucking the environment changes constantly,” CEO Hans Galland said during an Oct. 26 press conference at the American Trucking Associations Management Conference & Exhibition. “The moment you have a plan it’s essentially outdated.”

Galland said “suboptimal dispatch planning” costs fleets between $150 billion [and] $200 billion every year as dispatchers either “rely on tribal knowledge or struggle with optimization tools that don’t fit their workflows.”

The company’s system allows “optimizing and re-optimizing load assignments across drivers, tractors and trailers, routes and schedules using AI-powered algorithms and constraint management,” he added.

In practice, that means users can simply talk to the system and it will conjure new plans on the spot.

“We are delivering a natural language interface that the dispatcher or load planner can enter information that just popped up,” Galland said. “For instance, you could say, ‘Avoid I-95 because there is inclement weather.’ Or ‘Prioritize deliveries to Walmart over Target.’ Or you could say, ‘Don’t assign overnight drives to driver Johnston because his wife is sick.’ ”

“This is technology that doesn’t replace the human, but augments the human,” added Beyond Trucks Chief Scientist John Carlsson.

Galland noted that fleets often lament the difficulty of hiring and retaining good dispatchers. “Some of the largest fleets in this country would say dispatch talent is a bottleneck,” he said.

Carlsson noted technology like this could help with recruiting younger people into dispatch jobs. “This is a generation that was born the year the iPhone was launched,” he said. “They have a different expectation of what technology is supposed to like. This will make it easier to onboard new talent.”

Longer-term, Galland said the technology will help dispatchers with the role they play with fleets. “We’re not here to replace people, we’re here to make them more influential and powerful.”

The system, he said, can help fleets reallocate dispatchers’ time. “Dispatchers can become more like driver care managers,” he said.