The Need for Greater 'Human-In-The-Loop' AI Strategies for Manufacturers with Transportation Fleets

Artificial Intelligence is transforming how transportation fleets and manufacturing operations navigate today's volatility, from rising costs to supply chain disruptions.

- Katerina Jones

Yet true resilience emerges when advanced AI analytics are balanced with expert-driven Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) strategies, enabling smarter decisions, optimised assets, and sustained operational continuity.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to dominate conversations in business, finance, and technology. At the same time, organisations with transportation fleets face an economy now defined by prolonged volatility, rising equipment costs, exploding prices from trade wars, extended life cycles, labour shortages, inflationary pressures, and supply chain disruptions. For manufacturers, these disruptions extend beyond transportation, as they directly impact plant throughput, raw material availability, finished goods velocity, and production continuity.

As we look ahead to the final stages of 2025 it is important to think about how today's leading companies operating transportation fleets are now balancing the over-glamorisation of data automation along with human expertise by leveraging both advanced AI-enabled analytics and expert-driven Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) principles to achieve operational efficiency and financial resilience.

The Power of AI & Human Interaction

Especially in today's turbulent economic climate no matter the industry, AI-enabled analytics and data insights offer teams a vital tool to achieve financial and operational resilience. In manufacturing, this resilience directly influences supplier delivery timing, line uptime performance, WIP buffering strategy, and OTIF fulfilment outputs. By rapidly processing vast datasets on maintenance, fuel consumption, and market trends, AI can refine Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) models with unprecedented accuracy, moving beyond historical averages to predict future costs with greater certainty.