AI is increasingly becoming a business imperative. Nine in 10 Fortune 1000 companies are not only investing in AI, but are increasing those investments, with 92% reporting measurable business benefits from their current AI use — up from 72% in 2020 and just 28% in 2018, according to a 2022 NewVantage Partners executive survey.
Still, only 26% of companies say their AI initiatives have actually moved into widespread production. The biggest obstacle? Cultural barriers, with executives 11 times more likely to say culture is the greatest impediment to AI success than to cite technology limitations as the biggest barrier.
And the cultural challenges have actually gotten worse, with 92% of executives citing cultural factors this year vs. 81% in 2018.
The upshot? Companies are finding that the key to successfully operationalizing AI comes down to people, and putting them at the center of their initiatives.
When Michael DiMascola, safety business partner at Herr’s Foods, wanted to reduce accidents for its delivery trucks, the first thought was to install surveillance cameras to watch drivers.
The Pennsylvania-based maker of potato chips, cheese curls, and other snacks operates a fleet of 640 vehicles to distribute products in the eastern United States and Canada, and drivers already had a bad taste in their mouths from a previous attempt to install cameras in their cabs.
“The stigma was that Big Brother was watching,” DiMascola says. “And they lit up like a Christmas tree when an event happened, so it was more of a distraction.”
If the problem is that drivers are too distracted, then adding yet another distraction isn’t going to help, he concluded. Plus, the old cameras only triggered after something bad happened, such as a collision or sudden braking or acceleration. “We needed to get ahead of those events,” says DiMascola, who saw distracted driving as a top priority to address.
So this time around, Herr’s took a different approach. DiMascola found potential vendors at a national safety conference in 2018 and started a pilot project with Nauto, a maker of AI software for driver and fleet safety, that fall.
The new cameras DiMascola wanted to deploy paid attention to where drivers are looking so they can alert them if their eyes strayed too long from the road — something that could have potentially been perceived as even more intrusive than the first set of cameras Herr’s used.
“That was something we were very concerned about,” DiMascola says. “Just another Big Brother piece, but now in every truck.”
The rumor mill started up quickly, he says. To get ahead of this, DiMascola needed a personal touch. For the first deployment, he picked two busy locations and trucks that were part of the company’s tractor-trailer fleet. “I went personally to each and every one of our locations, and sat personally with each and every one of our drivers,” he says.
He built a rollout program that included the vendor’s welcome videos, and then showed recordings of collisions, attempted fraud claims, and near misses. “We took our time and made sure that questions were asked, FAQs were out there,” he says. “The training was absolutely the most important piece of it.”
The end goal was to keep the drivers as safe as possible. And taking eyes off the road, even for a short time, can be deadly. “At 50 miles an hour, in 5 seconds you’ve traveled a football field and a half,” he says. “That’s a long distance to be distracted.”
The new platform puts data into the drivers’ hands, he adds. They can see the results in real-time — not just instances of distracted driving, but also dangerous cornering, tailgating, and other near misses and close calls.
Drivers with the best scores get rewarded with gift cards and cash prizes, as wella as cookouts for the branches with the best results.
“In September, I was at three different branches doing cookouts for those branches that had the three highest scores for the entire year,” says DiMascola.
