Diesel Goes Digital Reloaded: How Commercial Repair Shops Are Using AI

In a recent article, we talked about the broader appearance of artificial intelligence (AI) in the world and what impact it might have on the heavy-duty industry. Today, we’re going to explore some of the ways heavy-duty pros have already put it to work.

To be clear, we’re mostly referring to AI in its most current popular iteration: the Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude (among others) that you’ve seen splashed across the news. They are giant repositories of information that can sift through data like a whale sifts through krill. 

(Editor’s Note: Not exactly how it happens but I like the mental image, so I’ll allow it.) 

Later on in this article, however, we’re going to touch on a couple other types of AI that shops have found useful. 

In the prior article, we established that the AIs we have access to are great at reviewing and analyzing data. We’ve talked to several shop owners who see a lot of potential in AI, but they expect to see that potential fully realized down the road. 

But is AI useful now?

Yes! It can be!

We sat down with Bobby Chambers, President of Liberty Fleet Solutions and guest star on a recent Shop Owner Roundtable episode. He’d expressed enthusiasm about AI in repair shops during an email conversation, and we were interested in how he had put it to work and whether or not his shop had been taken over by Skynet and/or Agent Smith. 

Spoiler alert: it hasn’t. 

(Unless…that’s what they want us to think.)

But in all seriousness, Bobby has been pleased with how the rollout has gone and shows no signs of being controlled by the Matrix. “It’s a tool we have to learn to use,” he said. “We haven’t even begun to understand all the places we could or should be using it.” 

How Heavy-Duty Repair Shops Use LLMs

USE CASE: AI FOR CLEANING UP TECHNICIAN NOTES

Liberty Fleet Solutions deals with some third-party billing companies. Some of you can probably see where this is headed: the forms those companies use only accept a certain number of characters or words. If a tech has taken copious notes, transferring those notes into the system often proves difficult.

So they started plugging the notes into ChatGPT. They asked it to condense them into the parameters allowed by the billing companies. The AI edited the notes into something they could copy and paste into the necessary forms. 

Once the team realized, “Hey, ChatGPT is pretty good at this stuff,” they started inputting notes not destined for third-party billing into it so it could correct grammar and smooth out rough sentences. 

Bam! It sped up some workflows and made a difference for customers.

(Want to give it a try for yourself? Fullbay’s AI-powered Service Order cleans up technician notes — no need to go wandering to ChatGPT to do it! Early feedback from customers is high: they’re impressed with how it works. One shop reported it helped them save 10 minutes on large service orders. Better yet, they ended up spending 20% less time on paperwork. Wowza! We made the thing and we’re pretty impressed.) 

If you don’t have Fullbay, or are curious about what ChatGPT can do, we’ve still got you. Here are a few sample prompts courtesy of ChatGPT to get you started. Feel free to tweak them and/or come up with your own:

• Please* turn these messy notes I wrote during a repair job into a clean, professional work order description that I can give to the customer.
• These notes are shorthand and a little rough. Rewrite them so they’re clear, easy to understand, and use correct mechanical terms without losing important details.
• Take these raw notes and make them sound customer-friendly, like I’m explaining what I fixed and why in plain language.

There is a caveat to this: A human being still needs to check over the edited notes. The AI can get a lot of things right, particularly when it comes to just tidying up existing text. But it can also slip.

In a pertinent example, the Wistia Transcriberbot (not its real name) heard this writer say “shop processes” and wrote down “going shopping.” So…make sure you or your techs are reading over completed notes just to make sure you aren’t suggesting going to the mall instead of, you know, working on processes.

Speaking of processes…AI can help with that, too. 

USE CASE: AI FOR EDITING SHOP POLICIES & EMAILS

Like many mechanics and engineers, Bobby is a bit more at home working on machines than drafting up long documents. He types up shop processes and asks Microsoft Copilot to make a document flow better. 

We used ChatGPT for this one, but similar prompts might look like this:

• I’ve written out the steps for one of our shop processes, but it’s a little rough. Please rewrite it so it’s clear, easy to follow, and formatted like a step-by-step checklist my techs can use.
• These process notes are detailed but wordy. Please condense them into a simple quick-reference guide that highlights only the key steps and decisions a tech needs to make.

And then there are emails.

Most of us have been there at some point: We need to send an email, but we’re maybe not in the right frame of mind to send a nice email. “Maybe I’m mad at a customer or vendor,” Bobby told us. “I type in what I want to say, and then I let ChatGPT or Copilot clean it up for me so it sounds more…professional.”

Here are a few prompts you can use: 

• Please turn this information into a polite and professional email I can send to a customer.
• Can you remove the swearing from this note and make it sound better so I can send it to a customer?

Again, you’ve got to review what the machine produces — don’t just copy and paste something blindly into your email.

USE CASE: AI FOR REPORTING INSIGHTS

Fullbay Product Manager Ryan Magnum has been experimenting with AI since ChatGPT rolled up into the public consciousness in 2022. He was excited to show us what kind of insights it could pull from Fullbay’s reports. 

Take the Inventory Velocity Report. As you might assume from the title, it tells you how fast the inventory in your shop is moving. Ryan uploaded a sample version of this report to ChatGPT. He then asked the AI the following:

Show me a summary of my inventory that sold this week. 

It immediately pulled the top five highest-selling parts of that week (fuel filters and copper lugs took the top two spots). It also provided a high-level summary of sold inventory, including total unique parts sold and total customers served. 

From there, we could go in several directions. Some potential prompts include:

• Break down parts sold by each shop location.
• Analyze returns, adjustments, or transfers during the week.
• Show me parts with positive demand.
• Based on what I sold this week; what would you recommend I have on the shelf?

Ryan then uploaded the Sold Parts report and gave ChatGPT this prompt:

Tell me the top 10 parts to stock in my inventory. 

It analyzed the report and provided the top ten parts he should stock based on sales frequency, which included fuel filters, motor oil, and Freon.

Other prompts Ryan used included:

• What was my cost to buy all this?
• What was the revenue?

Questions like these can give you a fuller picture of how your business is doing — and most importantly, you can verify the numbers by, you know, looking at the reports yourself. ChatGPT will also often offer you follow-up information based on its analysis, and that data can be insightful. 

This area is where AI can really shine. It crunches through numbers with the voracity of an accountant hopped up on 10,000 espressos. A can pull actual insights and develop hypotheses based on a bunch of numbers that might take you days to come up with (if you did at all). It can point you in different directions and help you explore. 

How Heavy-Duty Repair Shops Use Other Types of AI

USE CASE: AI FOR PARTS IDENTIFICATION

We’re going to pivot away from the LLMs for a moment and focus on image-matching artificial intelligence, in particular Google Lens, which Bobby has used to track down parts.  “Every once in a while on these trucks you find a part you can’t quite identify,” he said. “Like a random old trailer hub or a valve off a fire truck, or just something weird that doesn’t have a part number on it.” 

Google Lens works by searching pictures instead of words. When Bobby can’t ID a part, he takes a picture of it on his tablet or phone (the app is available for Androids and iOS). Google Lens then scours the web and finds a match.

“It might be a picture someone put on eBay years ago, but it might get you a part number, or enough information to find that part and save a ton of time in those hard situations,” he said. 

Once Bobby or a tech has that part number in hand, or even a name, they at least have a place to start their search. 

While it’s often advertised as an app to help you identify a cute dog or a purse you like or even just a really neat plant, Google Lens is, in fact, a useful tool for a technician digging through heavy equipment and pulling a mystery part. “It tells you where to buy the purse, but it works with the truck brake chamber, too,” Bobby laughed. 

(We’ll once again chime in here with our new mantra: “A human needs to check it.” Bobby has not had a problem working with Google Lens, but again, the app can make mistakes.) 

DASHCAM MONITORING

We’ll let you in on a little secret: you might already be using AI in some way if you’re using one of the fancier dashcam systems. You know, the kind that notice if a driver’s not wearing a seatbelt, or if they’re talking on a cellphone, or are otherwise distracted. 

“It’ll pull those video clips and alert a fleet manager to review those clips,” Bobby explained. “It gives all the drivers a rating based on all their data from speeding to braking to cornering … it’s picking up all those things. It’s wild.”

But Fullbay, you might be thinking, that’s probably useful for fleets and all, but what use is it to my shop?

Well, if you’ve got a service truck or other company vehicles, you might find a dashcam (even if it doesn’t have AI on it) useful in that it can protect your drivers and business from fraudulent claims. Bobby related a story about another driver rear-ending one of their shop trucks after the shop driver pulled over to assist another vehicle. The other driver evidently gave confusing testimony to the insurance company. Bobby uploaded the dashcam footage and that was the end of it. 

(It helped them take care of about $7,000 worth of damage.) 

THE OBLIGATORY WARNING

Sooooooo AI is pretty neat. But…

(C’mon, you knew this was coming.) 

You can probably say it with us by now: AI is not infallible. Sometimes it may not even work (while showing us the prompts and insights, Ryan’s ChatGPT experienced an error and threw a request timeout). And there’s still plenty of variance between AIs and even between models. So you may get different answers from different versions.

Guess what that means?

In every single use case we’ve presented today, you still need the human being in there checking on things to make sure they’re not, you know, completely off the wall. 

HAVE YOU USED AI IN YOUR SHOP YET?

Obviously, AI has a lot of promise. It’s no wonder some shop owners and managers are so interested in it. When used correctly, it may be able to augment workflows and just make life easier. 

But despite its rapid growth, AI is still very much in its infancy. How else will it evolve and improve? What will it do next? We’ll all have to stay tuned to find out. And if you’re a Fullbay subscriber, you can check out our AI-powered Service Order and see how much you’ll get done when 20% less of your time is dedicated to paperwork!

*You don’t have to say please, but this writer always does. Better safe than sorry, dude.