
Open Source CXO: The Tech Leader's Podcast · 2024-08-14 · 38 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
60 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Rig Technologies operates a mobile and web-based marketplace that solves a critical supply-demand inefficiency in commercial truck repair. Unlike traditional methods where drivers search Google or NTTS listings - favoring the highest marketing budgets over quality - Rig uses real-time bidding to connect drivers with nearby mobile mechanics. Alex Savenok built the product over two years, initially with distributed teams in Russia and Ukraine, before pivoting to bootstrapped, revenue-focused growth after SVB's failure made capital harder to raise. The platform now processes roughly 150,000 monthly transactions with 700+ mechanics completing jobs in the past six months across all US regions. Key differentiators include dramatic reduction in bidding time (1.5 hours to 5 minutes), support for Spanish-speaking mechanics to expand addressable market, and a focus on user experience for high-stress situations - truckers facing $100K-200K equipment breakdowns don't have patience for flashy interfaces. The business model monetizes through the driver side, takes commission on repairs, and is developing fleet-specific features including EFS payments and T-checks by year-end. Savenok's background spans IT leadership, finance (HSB Risk internship, day trading), and economics, giving him perspective on marketplace dynamics and arbitrage - prices for identical repairs in the same region vary 200-300%, indicating massive market inefficiency.
Instead of drivers calling mechanics serially based on Google rankings, Rig sends a real-time notification blast to all mechanics within 200 miles of the breakdown location. Mechanics submit bids via app or web link, generating 2-4 bids within 5 minutes instead of the traditional 1.5 hours of sequential calling.
Towing a semi truck typically costs $1,500-2,000, while average on-site mobile repair costs ~$600. Additionally, drivers often need to tow both the tractor and trailer to avoid abandoning cargo on the highway, effectively doubling towing costs.
Rig evolved gradually from small regional markets to larger ones rather than launching nationally. The company made it easy for mechanics to join (no app download until a $600-800 job was guaranteed) and used Google ads to target both mechanics and drivers strategically in specific geographies.
Individual drivers can pay directly, but fleets prefer industry-specific methods like EFS payments and T-checks since they operate on factored credit lines. Rig is adding these payment options this month to better serve fleet customers.
As of the interview month, Rig is on pace to hit $50,000 in monthly revenue with approximately 150,000 transactions per month across the network.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode contains several concrete operational insights about marketplace dynamics, team management during geopolitical disruption, and the specifics of the trucking repair market (towing costs, ELD data, multi-unit logistics). However, much of the conversation drifts into general startup philosophy (fail fast, iterate, MVP) and AI tangents that recycle familiar arguments rather than introducing novel claims. The guest does offer useful specifics on bid turnaround (5 minutes vs. 90 minutes) and payment methods for fleets, but these are interspersed with filler and repetitive explanations.
On average, you're trying to get four to five bids. That usually takes an hour and a half. In our system, it's five minutes because our mechanics use their apps to submit bids and we blast within a single area.
The average cost for mobile repair on the side of the road is like $600. Average cost for a tow just a few miles is like $1,500, $2,000.
The core insight - that Google ranking doesn't optimize for quality in the mechanic-finding market - is sensible but not particularly fresh. The AI discussion is largely recycled (LLMs eating their own data, AI won't replace programmers, etc.), and the MVP/fail-fast framework is canonical startup orthodoxy. The predictive breakdown modeling idea using ELD + weather data is more original, but it's presented as speculative rather than validated. Most of the episode rehashes standard marketplace two-sided network challenges.
Whenever I change something and I see revenue go up, that's very exciting. There's no amount of code I could create to get that rush.
The greatest indicator of success for a startup entrepreneur is time in the market. I mean, how quickly they iterate and how long can they last?
Alex is the CEO/CTO of an early-stage SaaS marketplace with ~2 years in market, now hitting $50K/month revenue. He has operational credibility - he's doing development, managing customer support calls (100/day), executing marketing experiments, and navigating real constraints (geopolitical supply chain disruption, capital scarcity post-SVB). However, he's not a household name, hasn't scaled to large revenue, and there's limited evidence of prior successful exits or large-scale operational experience beyond his previous role at Vertigo (which receives minimal detail). He's a competent practitioner early in a growth phase, not a battle-tested executive.
Right now, I basically am doing the development myself.
We're on pace to hit $50,000 in revenue a month. And transaction volumes are going to be around 150,000 a month.
The episode is moderately strong on specifics: named metrics ($50K/month revenue, 150K transactions, 100 support calls/day, 10-15 jobs/day), concrete pricing data ($150 - $450 for bids, $600 repair vs. $1,500 - $2,000 towing), geographic scope (all over the US, Spanish-speaking market targeting), and operational details (bid response time, EFS/T-check payment methods for fleets). However, significant claims lack evidence: no data on customer acquisition cost, churn, mechanic retention, or funnel conversion rates despite claiming to track them. The AI discussion is abstract and speculative. Fleet launch timeline is vague ('six months'/'ish').
We've got about 100 a day. 100 phone calls? Yeah, yeah.
The average cost for mobile repair on the side of the road is like $600. Average cost for a tow just a few miles is like $1,500, $2,000.
The host (David Welch) asks reasonable opening questions and shows competence, but follow-ups are often soft. When Alex mentions data tracking, the host doesn't push for specific numbers (CAC, LTV, churn). The AI discussion veers into philosophical speculation without the host challenging premises - they're largely agreeing rather than probing. The conversation meanders from RIG mechanics to day trading losses to generative AI without tight narrative control. There are moments of good follow-up (on geographic expansion, payment methods), but many claims go unexamined (e.g., 'three times revenue growth' in June - no context on baseline; 'fleets in 6 months' stated twice vaguely).
I'm curious to hear how your experience has been, is I've counseled people before of pick an MVP.
Are you tracking... Obviously, you get all the bids and things like that. Do you do any form of tracking and reporting?
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
Join Alex Savenok, CEO and CTO of Rig, on this week’s episode of Open Source CXO. Dive into the world of SaaS innovation as Alex shares his journey from being a tech leader to spearheading a startup focused on solving inefficiencies in the trucking industry. Rig offers a unique marketplace solution for emergency breakdowns in the trucking space, connecting truck drivers with skilled mechanics in real-time. In this episode, Alex discusses the challenges of transitioning from a tech-focused role to leading a company, the hurdles of marketing to a non-tech-savvy audience, and the strategies that have helped Rig grow amidst a tough economic climate. He also breaks down the potential and limitations of AI in the trucking industry, exploring how the technology can be leveraged for predictive maintenance and operational efficiency, while cautioning against the overhype and challenges that come with integrating AI into real-world applications. Tune in to explore the intersection of technology, marketing and artificial intelligence as Alex reveals the secrets to building a successful marketplace in a highly specialized industry.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
You're listening to another episode of Open Source CXO, the podcast designed to share insights on how to excel in your business using technology, regardless of the industry. Host Robert Kehoe is a self-taught software developer who has grown to the role of CEO. Renowned for his collaborations with organizations such as Stanford University, Nelnet, and Louis Vuitton, he continually seeks new challenges to conquer in the world of tech. Joining him is Don Blackburn, a veteran COO with over 25 years of experience in cultivating diverse relationships and driving innovation in various technical projects.
Each week, they'll be sitting down with some of the nation's foremost technology leaders to develop an open source playbook, drawing from their firsthand experiences in the field. Let's talk some tech. Well getting started today for this episode, I wanted to point out that Robert is on vacation now that we're in the summer months. And filling in for Robert is David Welch.
Dave is one of our directors at Active Logic and all around good guy and podcast veteran himself. Correct? YouTube? Not podcast?
I don't talk to other people. I just talk to myself. Just talk to the camera. I got you.
All right. He imagines the people. Exactly. And our guest today is Alex Savinoch, who is CEO, CTO of RIG, who's a startup SaaS product.
Yes. SaaS product marketplace play, similar to Uber, focused on breakdowns in the tracking space. So outstanding. And welcome, by the way, to our podcast.
I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. We're going to talk to you about a couple of different things. One, and we can start with RIG. I know you've got a long background, extensive background in IT, but with RIG, you just, I'm guessing, just saw kind of a spot, an empty space in the market that you could fill?
Yeah. I had a friend who was a mobile mechanic and he came to me with his problems. He's like, I live in Kansas City. This is basically the middle of America, thousands of trucks driving by every single day.
And I can't get a job. Like, I can't get someone to call me. Like way too many truck drivers have problems that they can't find a mechanic, but I can't find them either. Right.
And that was sort of the genesis of the problem. I started looking into, I mean, I have an econ major. Like I constantly look at markets and supply and demand and price. Like how is price determined?
How are people finding supply? And how is that supply? What is the demand and what is the supply? How are they meeting?
What is the market place? So in this situation, the marketplace is very inefficient because the way a truck driver finds a mechanic is a Google search or search the NTTS or truck down. What that means is they basically look through a list of phone numbers, call people in serial fashion based on whoever paid more. And oftentimes that means the guy who's got the biggest marketing budget and the best website, not necessarily the best skills, the best quality work or the most experience gets on top.
Sure. And that is kind of an inversion of the values that the driver is looking for. He's looking for a good price, good quality and likely timely service. And none of that really goes into who's on top on Google.
And so I realized the supply and demand wasn't working based on what it was supposed to be working on. And it's just a mobile app at this point? No, it's a web app. We've got a mobile driver app.
We've got a mobile mechanic app. We've got a web platform for shops. We have a web platform for fleets probably coming out in six months or something like that. That just means, you know, sometime in the future when you have time to finish it.
When I have time to get to it. Yeah, gotcha. I think you understand what that, you know, a systemal timeline means. Yes, I do.
So I would think one of the big challenges, not just certainly the tech. I mean, you've been in tech the whole time and now you're a CEO. You've been a CTO with a large team. Now you're a CEO and it's a, are you a one man show?
Do you have other developments? Right now, I basically am doing the development myself. I did a lot of early bootstrapping. We had a team, SCB failure really made the market really hard to raise capital.
On top of that, our team was in Russia. So that was kind of the problem. That was complicated. I couldn't even send them payments for a while.
And it was, I mean, I'm Russian, so I speak Russian fluently. My wife's family is from Ukraine. So it was a unique experience. I have a brother-in-law who runs a software outsourcing firm in Ukraine.
And, you know, I was outsourcing to guys in Russia and I was, you know, it's not. A little political. So I eventually, we couldn't keep working with them. And I couldn't afford a large team because there wasn't capital for it.
We didn't have, we haven't started producing revenue yet. And the market, right, really didn't mean, when we're talking investor expectations after SCB failure really shifted to revenue driven metrics. And it became, if you don't have revenue, it becomes much, much harder to raise capital. So it became really difficult.
But you know, we improvised, I basically started doing all the soft. We transitioned to focusing on revenue first. We already had a product, figured out how to adjust that product to start producing revenue. So sort of generating revenue in October.
Now I think this month we're on pace to hit $50,000 in revenue a month. And transaction volumes are going to be around 150,000 a month. So it's growing. And I think in June we doubled the revenue and July expect it to be around 30%.
Thanks. Outstanding. Are you focusing mostly on the individual trucker or trucking companies as far as bringing them on board? Both.
The approach to both of them is different. So you approach a truck driver a little different than you would a fleet. And what's interesting with fleets is the payment method is different. The way they do things is very different.
So a fleet will usually, oftentimes they like to pay with industry specific payment methods because everything is factored. They have credit lines and they want to pay out of them. They don't want to pay out of their cash. So EFS payments, T-checks, things like that are really important in the industry.
Working on getting those out this month is something I'm working on now. Anyway so that's the bigger difference. There's other distinctions where fleets are far more time sensitive whereas an individual truck driver is more price sensitive. So a fleet is willing to pay more as long as you can get someone out quicker.
So different opportunities. And a driver is easier to find. It's one person, Google ads at the right place will get them. So I was going to ask, that's the biggest challenge I would think as a startup is the marketing side.
It's getting the name out, making people aware of you're there. Absolutely, as a guy who comes in from the tech side, it's not something that I came in with experience. Though what's interesting is my previous experience with Vertigo is that we had so many different unique marketing strategies that I think I basically walked through how to implement each of them. We had influencer driven marketing.
We had ad based Instagram, Facebook, Google ads marketing. We did events. We did referrals. I don't think we ever did any kind of referrals though.
It's something that in my space right now through it would probably work well. It's something I'm probably going to take a look at. So I definitely had a lot of exposure to different marketing campaigns and marketing strategies. But never actually did it myself.
So it's different when you do it yourself. You have to test things out. You have to actually track your metrics, track how much you're spending versus how much you're earning. So it's a different experience.
Honestly, I enjoy it a lot. It may enjoy it more than development. Well you see with development, whenever you're building something, every time you add incremental value it's not necessarily tangible. With marketing, the moment you twist a dial and you see revenue go up, that's a thrill that's hard to replicate with development.
As an entrepreneur, that's kind of what I'm aiming for. So anytime I change something and I see revenue go up, that's very exciting. There's no amount of code I could create to get that rush. You don't see a massive increase in users every time you push?
No. I think that is probably one of the major disconnects for many founders and entrepreneurs who come from the tech side. They really enjoy creating elegant code, but I think they've never experienced the rush of money coming in at higher rates. So that is really, it's a lot of fun to do that.
I'm enjoying it a lot. From the tech perspective, we deal with a fair amount of startups and people that are trying to bootstrap a startup and have a great idea, but trying to get it to market is always a challenge. The one thing we always talk about, and I'm curious to hear how your experience has been, is I've counseled people before of pick an MVP, try to pick a product that you can get out there that's not bare bones, but something, you have those folks that think they got to go out with a fully baked product.
The way I say it is how wrong do you want to be? If you make a big product and you put $10 million into it, you're going to be $10 million into a bad product because you're not going to work from the beginning anyway. So how much money do you want to put into a bad product? Because it's going to be a bad product when you release it.
I think it's Elon Musk that said, fail quickly and learn. I think there's, and that's probably butchering that quote, but- Well, how big do you want your failure to be? Make it smaller and you figure out what you did wrong and quicker. To assume that you know exactly what the market wants is- I mean, you have to have an idea.
It has to be somewhat approximate somewhere, but you're going to be way off because you have to really be finely tuned. No one in the market is going to account for your... They're not going to care if your product isn't working the way you expect it. No one's going to give you a second chance.
This is a market. No one has to show you kindness or mercy. That's true. It has to work when you go to market, when you go live.
The market isn't a charity. But have you gotten a significant amount of feedback since you put the product so you get feedback from both the truckers and the mechanics? We've been iterating for almost... We released our product two years ago.
We've been iterating on it for two years. Personally, I think the greatest indicator of success for a startup entrepreneur is time in the market. I mean, how quickly they iterate and how long can they last? A lot of times, for an individual person, that's actually how much pain can you tolerate, how much fear can you handle because there's going to be times it can look like you're going to fail.
There's going to be times when it's going to hurt, it's not going to be comfortable. If you aren't able to manage all those emotions well, it's not likely that you're going to last more than a year maybe. I found that time in market and the ability to iterate consistently over time is a better indicator of success than almost anything. How far off were your original?
How much did you learn going to market? Some of our original assumptions were correct, but what was wrong was how do we get people to use it? We were correct in assuming that drivers would really want to get to mechanics. What we didn't understand really was the chicken or the egg problem for a network.
If you don't have a network, you don't have a product in our situation. Even if I have the best looking app, it works exactly how people expect it, but there aren't 3,000 mechanics on the other side ready to respond. I don't have a product. That's a marketplace play.
Our biggest problem was okay, so we got drivers using this, but now they don't like that because there's no one on the other end really. They got two mechanics to choose from. Two mechanics to choose from. How do we get this to grow incrementally?
Our journey over the last two years was hey, how do we grow? How do you go from a market that requires 3,000 mechanics? How do you make it evolve gradually? Taking small steps, evolutionary steps up to a large market that then you can expose to fleets, drivers, whatever.
That I think was the biggest problem we solved. With 3,000 mechanics in our network, we had over I think 600, 700 mechanics do jobs for us just in the last six months. Oh, nice. Is that geographically around here?
All over the US. Oh, okay. How are you getting a mechanic in Utah? How do they find out?
Google ads? Well, it's Google ads. It would take me about 20 minutes to explain the whole process of how we did all of this. We made it as easy as possible for the mechanic so that they never had to download the app until they knew they were going to get $600, $800 out of it.
That was really the thing that changed everything was mechanics naturally are not oriented towards using apps. They're not usually your 18, 19, 20-year-old Instagram type person. They're not watching it as much. They're probably the hardest people to get to use technology because they're making a good amount of money and they never had to use an app to do it before.
I had to convince them that it was worth doing it this way and why. Whenever there was money on the line, they were willing to work with me. Whenever I could get them a $600 job and they didn't have to pay $150 to get that job. You get your money from the trucker side?
Yeah. I get my money from the trucker side and they don't have to pretend to be advertisers. They don't have to try to think like a marketing genius. They don't have to figure out how to get their name, get exposure.
They can just focus on being a mechanic. Gotcha. That's the first thing I was going to bring up because one of the things we always fight with, not fight, but a big consideration when you're doing a SaaS product or a startup especially is the user experience. Your user community is totally different.
Your user community is truckers and mechanics. It has to be really, really simple. It's got to be straightforward, simple, and probably not terrible flashy. Well, it could be flashy.
It has to be simple, meaning there's no need for super... There's fade in, fade out effects, just pointless. There's very little room for animation in terms of value. The user does not value animation or special effects unless they somehow communicate something that makes things clear.
But what we did realize is one, we're dealing with people that are in high stress situations. Your truck that's probably worth $100,000, $200,000 just broke down. Our app has to be very easy to use because we're not just dealing with people who don't like technology. We're dealing with people who are really upset trying to use technology for the first time.
At the end of the day, they're probably going to be paying a pretty big bill. They may not always be happy with us at the end, but it's not really our fault either. We've provided probably the best price. We're trying to help.
We're trying to help. We're getting them the best price they can get. They just... The problem is the truck broke.
Sometimes you end up being the... You take the blame for the truck break. They've got to yell at a human, right? These are all mobile mechanics that you're working with?
Yes. Most of them are... Some of them have shops that have mobile mechanics. The unique thing about the trucking space is the cost to tow a large unit is very high.
You can take thousands of dollars to just take them a few miles because the cost is to get a wrecker that can tow a big... First of all, those wreckers cost a million and a half, two million dollars. The insurance on them is insane and a lot of times in places like New York, there's unions that won't even let you buy a wrecker if you want to. There's so much cost involved in actually towing a unit.
Oftentimes it's way cheaper to get it fixed on the side of the road. The average cost for mobile repair on the side of the road is like $600. Average cost for a tow just a few miles is like $1,500, $2,000. It almost always makes sense to get a mechanic on site, figure out what needs to get repaired and do it there instead of trying to tow a truck.
Not only that, most semis have their load plus... You have to get two units. You don't want to tow the actual... Because you don't want to leave that load on the side of the highway.
Then you got to have someone to tow the actual tractor. The tractor and trailer need to be towed so now that doubles your cost. That's why towing is really ineffective. Sometimes there's no choice.
You have to do it. If you can, avoid that. Almost everyone will. It's a much bigger market than just the regular, not commercial, it's regular car market space for mobile repair.
It's not that large because most people just $100 to tow to a shop. Triple A. Triple A. Get it towed.
In our case, that is not... I mean, the commercial space is very different because of the cost of towing and it's much more effective to repair on the side of the road. Talking about getting the need in front of the mechanics. I have a little bit of experience in the industry with an up-for-work employer and that process is a lengthy one.
A lot of it is towing and things like that. It's going through making... There's a call in. There's checking with multiple entities to get bids.
How do you... Obviously, you've got to find a way to shorten that. Yeah. For instance, on the bidding process, on average, you're trying to get four to five bids.
That usually takes an hour and a half. In our system, it's five minutes because our mechanics use their apps to submit bids and we blast within a single area. Let's say you break down in Kansas City. We send out, as soon as you submit a request in our system, we send out a notification or text message to all the mechanics in our system within 200 miles.
They get it, they either open up our web link or our app, submit a bid, and we should get two to four and five minutes. The crazy thing about the market is sometimes your prices are 200% higher in the same region, the same quality, same time. This guy's charging 450, this guy's 150. That's really the hallmark of an inefficient market when prices vary that much.
Great opportunity for arbitrage. I count from the finance. I actually interned at HSB Risk, so I have a lot of finance background. I always look at things from a marketplace perspective, like price, arbitrage.
Those are the things I understand very well. I was a day trader. I lost a lot of money. I lost $20,000 in a day once, and I was like, you know what?
People lost more, but I didn't have that much reserve, so I was like, okay, this is enough for me. I got to go do something else. Maybe not that much for a bid. Got you.
Interesting. I never thought of that. It's a bid process. You don't just go and search, oh, here's a list of four mechanics that are within 10 miles, and I'll pick the one I want.
It's a bid process, but the problem is the bidding process is very, very long. A lot of times, it'll just settle for whatever they get first. The first one you see. If they land on the guy who gave them a 200%, a price that's 200%, 300% higher than the best price in the area, they're overpaying significantly, plus losing time probably.
At this point, the trigger just enters the information, the type of truck he has, the problem estimation, and things like that. Then it goes out, a blast text or notification via mobile to all the mechanics in the area. They have X number of minutes to reply, or they can reply whenever it's just- They can reply whenever they want. There's no time limit, but the guy who replies fastest usually gets the job.
Yeah, right. Because the trucker's not going to sit there for a day waiting for it. We've had guys sit for a day. There's some areas that are just in times that are really hard to get a mechanic like if you're broken down in the middle of South Dakota, you're probably going to wait for a day or two, maybe.
You break down on July 4th. Sorry. You shouldn't be driving on July 4th. Just because if you break down, you're going to be stranded for a whole day.
Make sure your truck is nice and ready to drive before you drive on a holiday. Exactly. Then from a support standpoint, do you get a lot of calls, support calls? Yeah.
We get about 100 a day. 100 phone calls? Yeah, yeah. Or emails?
Phone calls. Really? Yeah, yeah. We do around 10 to 15 jobs a day right now, so it's a lot.
We have to man a call center and everything. We have to outsource all. One of the things we decided on early on is we outsourced to South America because it increased our market share because we can now target people who speak Spanish. There's a lot of them in Southern United States.
As long as their English is good, most people will deal with an accent. It's not that uncommon in the US to hear an accent. They speak Spanish, so it actually increased our target market by 10, 15 percent because there's a good chunk of people in the Southern United States who do not speak English very well, driving trucks, not speaking English. Yeah, makes sense.
That's interesting. Are you tracking... Obviously, you get all the bids and things like that. Do you do any form of tracking and reporting?
I'm thinking like cars.com, you got the Edmonds, this is a good deal. We track all of it, but we haven't started doing... I just haven't had the time to build a lot of the reporting.
We will eventually once we release that sleep portal in six months. Six months. Ish. Ish.
Yeah. So, it's definitely something that we have the data to do. We track and keep all that data. It's the reporting, visualization stuff that we haven't built yet.
I mean, there's a lot of reporting that I'm doing internally for myself. I track our conversion funnel. I track how often someone calls. How often does a request turn into a job?
How often is the job complete? What is our percentage? What does it look like if demand increases? How does our funnel...
What does that mean for revenue? So, all of that, the data we gather goes straight into a revenue model that we're working on. The fun part for me is the combination of technology, finance, and marketing. Sure.
I could see where it'd be helpful if I was a truck driver that's broken down and I've got a certain issue and I put that in to have a kickback and say, based on location and the type of repair, your average cost should be or past repairs have been. Yeah, absolutely. That way they know they're getting busy going, well, that's way higher than what normal is. Yeah, absolutely.
This is definitely something in our product roadmap. Yeah. Just... Not there yet.
Not there yet. Nine months. It's nine months. That's nine months away.
Add that to the project board. All right. Got it. One of the other topics, pivoting once again to that you and I kind of touched on briefly, but I wanted to get your opinion because you said something that was interesting to me and got me thinking about, and that's AI.
That's what everybody's into AI. Yeah. Right? It's just everything AI...
I almost wish I could put AI on my app right now. It would get funded in like three months. That's how you're going to say we're AI generator, AI driven. What's funny about my previous company Vertigo is the CEO was always trying to attach...
It was like 360 video, virtual reality. He was constantly trying to use what was hypey and include it in our pitch even though it didn't have anything to do with it because you could always project it as something that we could do if we got the funds for it. I always felt like, okay, I need to pull one of those moves and just attach a slide about AI. Just put it on the website.
They'll never know. Increase my chance of funding by 100%. Nobody's going to drill down and say exactly how are you using AI and what is your LLM? It's not going to be that.
But it was interesting, and I would agree with you, that it's a horribly overused term and horribly everybody says everything's AI driven and it's really not. Yeah, very complicated. You haven't found a way to use it yet. There's ways we can, but it's not going to be generative AI.
What do I generate? I can generate quotes, but AI isn't going to go do the job for the mechanic. The quote has to come from the mechanic. I could project an estimate.
That's probably the most I could do with generative AI is generate- Machine learning of some kind. Yeah. I mean, there's areas we could apply it. For instance, we have a lot of data on breakdowns, right?
If we combine that with ELD telemetric data about... Because every truck has a unit that actually tracks its mileage, location. Using the location, you can get the time, the date, the weather. You can combine all those factors as input into a model and then have your breakdowns as a signal.
There you have a predictive model. What conditions lead to a breakdown? That would be how I would use AI, predicting breakdowns. Finding what conditions have occurred, let's say a fleet is driving a unit and all of a sudden, we have a lot of conditions that are making this unit likely to break down.
What do we have to change to bring that probability down? What part of the unit do we have to service? All that kind of stuff. Because your breakdowns end up being your signals.
With LLM models or AI in general, machine learning, you have data and signal. Something that comes in that explains the circumstances. For instance, I did this with image recognition. You have a lot of images and then you have to have someone telling you the model, hey, this is the correct image.
And over time, you develop a model that then allows you to reuse it in machine learning. In our case, you have the data inputs from the truck, from the geographic location, from the weather, maintenance logs, combine that with actual breakdowns. You have a pretty good opportunity to create a predictive model on breakdowns, which is probably one of the biggest problems for every fleet. Could we use AI?
Absolutely, we probably will. I think for generative AI in general, not talking about how we would use it, the biggest problem I see is models reusing their own data. That's what I wanted to get to, is the data, right? The more that humans rely on AI to produce content, the less likely the AI model will improve.
Because what's happening is it's eating its own output. So it's like the snake eating its own tail. Right. And if the output's flawed to begin with and then it's brought back in, then it's just creating a visual.
So your output becomes your signal. That's the visual circle. That causes the model to actually skew further off versus correct. So that I think is going to be with LLM models, that is probably...
It makes data after chat GPT less valuable than before chat GPT, which is interesting unless you can somehow filter out what was created by AI and what was not. So that I think is when you're talking about LLM models, that I think might be one of the biggest things that needs to be solved. Just in terms of that specific type of AI, there's probably going to be different types of AI. All of them are going to be statistics.
It's all going to be statistics, complicated statistics. I don't see us ever using if-then statements to create a general AI that really gets all the conditions that could possibly ever occur in some massive logic machine. That's not going to happen. But the statistical approach, which is considered weak AI, not strong AI, I think definitely is very exciting.
But there's that data problem that needs to be solved long term. Yeah. It was an interesting take that when I talked to you, I never thought of that. The data is going to be...
It's only as good as the data that it has access to. So your model... The LLM. Yeah.
If you've got faulty data... Bad data, bad model. Yeah. It's going to put out bad output.
Well, when you think about it too, how much of that generated content is just being under the Internet? Yeah. It's hard to detect it too. Social media, blog posts.
I mean it... I would say the creative output of humanity is going to suffer more than anything else because of AI. So the people who continue to use their mind and remain creative are probably going to be the rare... I know people talk about, hey, you have to use AI to stay competitive, to be efficient.
I agree. But if you don't constantly practice creativity, eventually you're going to get replaced by AI too. You have to constantly exercise a muscle or else you're going to lose it. Creativity is no different than any other kind of discipline.
Sure. You constantly have to exercise it. So I say that that might be one of the most important things in the future if we do not continue to develop creativity. And it's always going to set people apart.
I mean creative thinking is not... And AI cannot reproduce unique and creative content. It can produce average content because that's what the model is built for. It's made to create average content.
And what statistics is all about is predicting what is expected and what is average and it will produce an average output, which is often for 50% of the population better than what they could do. Average is better than average. Better than what 50% of people can produce. So we've basically taken the least creative people in humanity and made them average, which I think is a great achievement for AI, but it's not going to replace creative thinking because it could only produce average.
I got you. So I haven't asked this question before, but I've seen this lately. I've even seen some advertising trending towards this of AI is going to replace programmers, developers, right? And I'm going, I don't see that ever happening.
I mean, I use AI in my programming and it's not even close. This has been a refrain for almost 30 to 40 years now. I know. Right.
There's been code generators dating back 25 years. They've been trying to replace developers for 30 years. They're the most hated people in the world. Everyone wants to replace developers because no one wants to pay them.
Right. Exactly. Yeah. So it's expensive.
It's expensive. But I don't see it happening. I don't either, but I wanted your take just because I've yet to talk to, I mean, you still see it though. There's still people that mostly non-technical people that are going, wow, surely the computer will start generating all its own code.
Right. And I'm going, no, it's not. I mean, the best I could see is maybe you have an AI type compiler, which takes more human legible instructions, which changes what coding looks like, but ultimately you're still talking to a machine and the guy is still really a programmer. You've just changed the language.
So the guy ends up being a programmer and he thinks he's not, but he's actually giving instructions that might be more human friendly, but they really have to be specific. They really have to be detailed. They have to be tested. They have to, you know, you have to have someone look at them and correct them and you have to maintain it probably over time.
That's just the way and that's programming. Sure. It's just different form of programming. It'll probably make it more efficient.
It'll make your jobs easier as developers. It depends on the output. Yeah. I mean, I, cause I use a copilot, a GitHub copilot.
There's some things that it's really good for, highly repetitive thing. Let's say I have a list and I'll output it as a CVS file, right? Great for that. Like, cause it's something that so many people have done, but if I need a unique implementation of business logic, like there's no way it's going to be able to do that.
It's stuff that that's very routine that I used to just, you know, go to stack overflow and find that copy and paste. Hopefully I'm not violating any, any, any licensing agreements. Whatever the stack overflow licensing agreement is. I hope you're okay.
Like I'm pretty sure everyone's done that. So the, the, uh, that is what it's replacing. It makes it much easier and quicker. I don't have to go to stack overflow.
I just, you know, start the function, name the method and all of a sudden I have a guess and I guess it's, you know, 90% of the time is correct. Especially when it's something that's, has been done by many other people. Sure. You have to know what you want.
Yeah. That's the thing. Yeah. You got to know what you want, which means you have to know how to program.
Otherwise you're guessing and you know, even if you're, if it's right 90% of the time over time that 10% failure rate is going to kill any product. Right. As a programmer, if you introduce bugs 10% of the time every single day, after a while there's going to be a lot of bugs, a lot of problems to deal with. It's not sustainable over a long time.
So yeah, it really helps if you know what you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, you aren't really going to be able to use it successfully because over time it's, it's deficiencies will kind of overpower your product. Yeah. So you're going to have a job for a while.
Yeah. That's good to hear. All right. So we're all going to have a job for a little while longer.