AI behind the wheel

Last week, we discussed how an entrepreneur had implemented weekly ‘AI Days’ to drive the use of the technology across his 400-strong workforce.

This week, I want to introduce you to an entrepreneur who has found a more specific use case for AI adoption in his SME.

Gurinder Dhillon is CEO of Otto Car, which he founded in 2015. I caught up with him recently at the “Unicorn School”, which Goldman Sachs runs for scaling SMEs, as part of its 10,000 Small Businesses initiative.

Otto Car is a great British success story. It leases electric vehicles to private hire drivers, like those who work with Uber. After a recent acquisition, it now has a fleet size of over 8,000 cars and annual revenues of £80m.

It took a pivot to get there. Dhillon used to run a business that leased black cabs. But he switched to electric vehicles when he saw a “cultural shift” on the horizon. People were hailing their cabs by swiping on their phones, not by outstretched hands on the curb. He told me the story of what happened when I met him in his car lot in west London last year.

Dhillon now sees a new “shift” on the horizon thanks to AI. He has installed his fleet with dashboard cameras to help cut down on insurance costs. This is because his business pays for the insurance across the fleet, rather than getting drivers to organise their own.

AI is working in conjunction with the cameras and other data sources to analyse the behaviour of drivers and reduce the risk of accidents by tagging dangerous behaviour and logging clips. It records things like late braking, tailgating and, of course, speeding.

It can also monitor drivers’ working patterns, like the frequency of breaks. AI is also spotting more surprising phenomena, like, for example, connections between accidents and jet lag after flights.

“We’re getting about 90-95 per cent accuracy with the AI,” says Dhillon, “then the last 5 per cent is just us checking what we’ve seen, but the algorithm is just getting better and better with time.”

“With 8,000 drivers, we can't monitor them all in real time and it’s impossible to figure out who is a risky driver, but AI can,” Dhillon tells me, with a team of just three people overseeing things.

The AI-analysed information is relayed back to drivers to educate them about their dangerous habits and help them to improve. “To be honest, most drivers are really receptive to it,” says Dhillon.

“It’s taken us two years to develop,” he adds, “and has already saved us a fortune.”

It’s a great example of an SME harnessing AI to spot patterns, increase efficiency and of course save costs, allowing it to invest in other areas. And it involves AI working in conjunction with humans to perform a task that humans would struggle to do alone.

This week’s guest on the Business Leader podcast is an entrepreneur who saw the potential of AI earlier than most. Jonathan Spry is co-founder and CEO of Envelop Risk. He started the company in 2016 after a career in insurance and investment banking, realising there was an opportunity in applying the science of machine learning to the reinsurance industry. Envelop now specialises in cyber and emerging risk underwriting for the industry.

AI is a double-edged sword when it comes to cybersecurity, he explains to Sir Richard Harpin. On one hand, the tech allows his company to evaluate risk very accurately. For example, they brainstorm “hundreds of thousands” of possible scenarios, covering everything from cloud failures, ransomware gang attacks and Black Swan events.

But AI also ushers in new risks. Cyber attackers can use it to find weaknesses in a company’s system or create convincing deepfakes to trick people. And also, the tech can hallucinate, which might also lead to insurance issues.

He also offers advice to British SMEs on how to stay safe from cyber attacks.

Guess the company

• Flight-search company Skyscanner was acquired by Chinese online travel giant Ctrip for £1.4bn
• Martin Shkreli, Panama Papers and Pokémon Go were in the news a lot
• BHS filed for administration
• SoftBank bought British darling Arm
• The “Mannequin Challenge” went viral

You'll find the answer at the bottom of this page

1. Business leaders have accused the government of missing a “critical opportunity” to support companies after the King’s Speech failed to offer relief on energy bills, business rates and employment costs. Industry groups said the speech contained welcome measures on late payments, financial regulation and trade with the European Union, but warned that ministers had failed to respond to the immediate pressures facing firms as the escalating conflict in the Middle East pushes up costs and further weakens business confidence.
2. The UK economy expanded 0.6 per cent in the first quarter, led by the dominant services sector, as the energy shock triggered by the Middle East conflict failed to derail its momentum. Thursday’s figure from the Office for National Statistics was in line with forecasts from economists polled by Reuters and compared with an upwardly revised 0.2 per cent expansion in the final three months of last year.
3. The boss of JPMorgan Chase has warned that the American bank would abandon its plan to build a new multibillion-pound skyscraper in London if the government tilts further to the left and lifts taxes on lenders. Jamie Dimon said on Tuesday that the Wall Street giant would “reconsider” its project for the tower in the Canary Wharf financial district if JPMorgan’s tax bill in Britain became “too much”.
4. In just three months, AI-powered hacking has gone from a nascent problem to an industrial-scale threat, according to a report from Google. The findings from Google’s threat intelligence group add to an intensifying, global discussion about how the newest AI models are extremely adept at coding – and becoming extremely powerful tools for exploiting vulnerabilities in a broad array of software systems.
5. One million households will be almost £900 a year worse off following Rachel Reeves’s tax raid on salary sacrifice schemes, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned. The Chancellor’s move to target pension salary sacrifice contributions will hit 4.7 million employees when it comes into force in April 2029, a report by the think tank found.

Weekend reading

❓ Are you meeting the needs of the people you lead?

Organisations often assume leadership succeeds or fails because of a leader’s style. But research on follower psychology suggests the bigger issue is alignment: Employees judge leaders based on whether they provide what people need most in a given moment. Drawing on research across the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, the Harvard Business Review argues that the best leaders are not defined by a single leadership style, but by their ability to diagnose shifting follower needs and adapt before misalignment erodes trust, engagement, and performance.

🏘️ How an AI jobs bloodbath could hit house prices at the worst possible time

AI is already reshaping the jobs market and it may soon test the foundations of the UK housing market. As unemployment rises, vacancies fall and AI-exposed workers face mounting pressure, experts warn that reduced buyer demand, higher mortgage stress and weaker confidence could collide with stubbornly high borrowing costs. For business leaders, the question is no longer just how AI changes work, but whether it could trigger the next major property shock.

And finally

Last Wednesday, I was able to gather together Business Leader colleagues, fellow journalists, PRs, friends and family to celebrate the launch of my new business book, Fail Smarter.

I’ve been writing it for the past four years, much of it inspired by my work with Business Leader over the past two years, which gives me access to amazing people and events. The book is all about the idea of failure in business. It’s a taboo subject, but what I’ve found is that it’s a vital topic that deserves to be discussed more openly and in its own right.

Most businesses fail within five years. Even for successful ones, the journey is defined by failures. If you gain the trust of a successful entrepreneur, the pain of failure is often what they want to talk about. And I’ve also found that some companies profit from a dividend once they open up the conversation about failures in their workplace. So I had lots of ideas to share in the book.

At the event, I had to make a short speech, and I wanted to talk about AI – and my mum. In the age of AI, I’ve noticed that some people latch on to it because they are afraid of words and writing. They are glad to outsource the responsibility of the written word to Claude or ChatGPT. But I’ve always loved words and think my thoughts by writing them out – and I enjoy the process.

Reflecting on it, it occurred to me that I should thank my mum, who all those years ago read for hours to myself and my brother, including everything from Roald Dahl to The Lord of the Rings. Those hours instilled in me a love of words and confidence in them too.

It was great to be able to thank her in person in front of the well-wishers, including my Business Leader colleagues. Even as AI transforms the way we work, we shouldn’t forget that we still need human judgment, emotion and thinking to guide it if it’s going to enhance our lives.

The answer to our question is 2016.