Wrong AI answers? Check your Geotab set-up first

Ask an AI tool which depot idles most and you'll get an answer in seconds. It will be written in good plain English, it will sound sure of itself, and it may be wrong.

When that happens, the cause is almost never the AI itself. It's the set-up underneath. An AI tool can only read the data your MyGeotab database holds, and if that data is organised badly, the answer inherits every fault.

Four set-up faults that lead to wrong answers

1. Vehicles in the wrong groups

Groups tell MyGeotab which depot, team or region a vehicle belongs to. If a ute moved from the northern depot to the southern one two years ago and nobody changed its group, every question about either depot counts it in the wrong place. Ask which depot idles most and the answer can point at the wrong one.

2. Depots and sites that aren't zones

Without zones, a stop at your own depot shows as an unknown location. Questions about time on site, travel between jobs or after-hours movement all depend on knowing where a vehicle stopped. An AI tool can't name a place the database has never been told about.

3. Trips with no driver

If driver identification was never set up, or drivers stopped using it, trips have a vehicle but no person. Any question about driver behaviour is answered from the small share of trips that do have a driver, which can tell a very different story from the whole fleet.

4. Rules that fire too often

Exception rules with thresholds that don't suit your vehicles create hundreds of alerts that mean nothing. Ask an AI tool for the worst offenders and it ranks the noise.

Why nothing on screen warns you

A wrong report usually looks odd to someone who knows the fleet. A wrong AI answer looks like any other answer. It's tidy, it's confident and it comes with a ranked list. That's why the set-up matters more once AI is involved, not less.

What to check before you trust an answer

• Pick five vehicles you know well and check their groups match where they actually work.
• Look at last week's stops for one vehicle. Count how many show as unknown locations.
• Check what share of trips have a driver. If it's low, any driver question is answered from a small sample.
• Count last month's exceptions by rule. If one rule produced most of them, its threshold needs a look.
• Ask a question you already know the answer to. If the AI gets it wrong, trace why before you ask it anything new.

Geotab's assistant and other AI tools

Geotab has its own AI assistant built into MyGeotab, and other tools can read the same data. The same rule applies to all of them: they answer from your set-up, so faults in groups, zones, rules or driver identification flow straight into the answer. Fix the data first, and every tool that reads it gets better material to work from.