Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024: How AI Is Making The School Bus Run Smarter, Safer, And Greener

Fortune

Ritu NARAYAN, Founder and CEO, Zum Moderator: Matt HEIMER, FORTUNE

Transcript

00:00Thank you all for being here.

00:01And we're so glad, Ritu, that you're here with us.

00:04I want to frame things here with a little personal story.

00:07I have a cousin who's in his early 60s,

00:09and he drives a school bus in the suburbs of Minneapolis.

00:13And he swears up and down that the bus

00:15that he's driving kids to school in every morning

00:18and every afternoon is the very same school bus

00:21that he was riding in in 1974.

00:25Which is to say, I mean his initials are carved

00:27into the back seat, the whole works.

00:28Which is all to say that this is an industry,

00:31as you might say, school bus transportation

00:32is an industry that is ripe for disruption.

00:35And that is what Ritu and Zoom have been doing.

00:40So tell us a little bit more about how you chose

00:43this business challenge.

00:44What made you decide this was a problem

00:46that was urgent to tackle?

00:49Yes, thank you, Matt.

00:49Excited to be here in Singapore.

00:52So Zoom solves a student transportation problem

00:56that has not changed in 80 years.

00:58As you were describing, kids today pretty much

01:01are riding the same way they were riding

01:03for last 80 years, or you and I did, our grandparents did.

01:06And a few years back, I was working for eBay

01:09when my kids transitioned to school.

01:11And I was seeing every industry around me

01:14getting disrupted using technology.

01:16But when it came to my personal life

01:18of picking up and dropping off my children,

01:20it was the dark ages.

01:22And interestingly, 30 years before that,

01:25my mom, who was an educator, had left the job

01:28for the exact same reason.

01:29And it was kind of a curiosity of why nothing

01:32had changed in this area.

01:34So with Zoom, what we have done is we have reimagined

01:37the entire student transportation

01:39by connecting every single stakeholders,

01:42from parents to children to drivers to operations

01:46to schools on one single platform

01:49to bring transparency, efficiency, safety, and reliability.

01:55So to make this work, the children have an RFID card,

01:59is that right, that tracks their location?

02:02And it's tracked through a network

02:03that brings the buses and the schools together?

02:06Yes, absolutely.

02:07So our routing technology has all the routes in the system.

02:13Drivers are using tablets.

02:14And when the child is onboarding the bus,

02:16they tap the RFID card, parent get notified,

02:19your child has onboarded the bus,

02:21school knows where your children are,

02:25and when they get down the bus, they tap the card again,

02:27and everybody knows in the system

02:30that they have offboarded the bus.

02:32It also, we have also been able to keep timeliness

02:36by doing that, by providing this to the system.

02:40Across the country, we have 98% plus on-time arrival

02:46and transportation for children, which matters a lot.

02:50Yeah, yeah, this is good.

02:51It's better for attendance, right?

02:53It essentially improves the education experience

02:56for the child, and for parents,

02:58especially parents in the service economy

03:01with jobs where the schedules aren't flexible,

03:04they don't have to worry about missing a day of work

03:06if the kid can't go to school.

03:08Hugely important.

03:09Absolutely, I mean, you won't believe

03:11it's such an integrated system using paper and pen

03:15and tracking that way that parents used to tell us,

03:19I can track my package using Amazon.

03:22I can track my pizza, but I have no idea

03:24where my children are and why is that,

03:26so that's a problem we are solving.

03:28Because this is an AI-centric crowd,

03:30and it is Fortune Brainstorm AI,

03:32talk a little bit about the role that AI plays

03:35in this kind of tech stack that you're bringing

03:38to the schools and the parents.

03:39Absolutely, AI is central to our business,

03:43and I'm going to talk about three specific use cases

03:46which might be very new to this particular group.

03:49So three specific use cases where we use AI

03:53is number one is our AI-driven routing technology

03:57and parent app.

03:58The number two is our vehicle-to-grid charging program,

04:02which I'm going to talk about a little bit.

04:04And third is the operational productivity,

04:06given how many people are involved,

04:08thousands of drivers and operational staff,

04:11how we use it.

04:13So let me talk about each one of these

04:15in a little bit more detail.

04:17The first, our routing technology,

04:19what it does, very soon, in a couple of weeks,

04:22U.S. has a back-to-school.

04:24Hundreds of thousands of students are going to go back,

04:27and we have to design and redesign the routes

04:29for every single school district

04:31according to the local conditions.

04:33And our routing software is able to create these routes

04:37very quickly, in record time,

04:39what would take months for these school districts.

04:42And in real time, optimize them based on various variables,

04:47like traffic conditions,

04:49the school schedules that are there,

04:50the preferences and classes of children

04:52that are happening in different variety of school.

04:55And by doing that, we are able to optimize

04:58the commute time for students.

05:00And that is huge.

05:02And if, heaven forbid, a bus were to break down,

05:05the system could very quickly adapt to that

05:07and reroute and scramble to make sure everybody

05:09got where they needed to be.

05:10Absolutely.

05:11And that's the kind of peace of mind

05:13to everybody in the system,

05:14that no matter what, this technology

05:16will really help guide and use our existing infrastructure

05:20to continue to make the transportation happen

05:23every single day.

05:24And our parent app basically provides a very accurate ETA.

05:29Parents can track, as you mentioned,

05:31the kids in the real time,

05:32and they know exactly when the bus is arriving,

05:35when the bus is leaving.

05:36And I'm sure a lot of us are parents in this audience,

05:39and myself as a parent, it is frustrating

05:42when you don't know where the bus is.

05:44So it brings not only peace of mind to parents

05:47and all the schools and school districts,

05:50but it also reduces the commute time for students

05:54and saves school money.

05:55That's amazing.

05:56By designing the system in such a way

05:58that you are using the most optimal size of the vehicle.

06:01And the money saving is an urgent point too

06:03for public schools in the United States,

06:05which are very often quite under-resourced.

06:08Talk about vehicle to grid.

06:09That's, many of the buses in the fleet

06:12that you're introducing are electric.

06:14How does the V2G system work?

06:16What's it designed to do?

06:17Yeah, absolutely.

06:18I would love to share with you

06:20that electric school buses are having a moment.

06:23And the reason for this is electric school buses are,

06:27school buses are the ideal asset to be electrified.

06:31They are largest battery on wheels,

06:33typically four to six times of Tesla battery.

06:37And they are one of those transportation vehicles

06:40that have very unique commute pattern.

06:42They commute locally and they're not used for transportation

06:46in the peak demand of energy,

06:47which is typically evenings and summertime.

06:50So what we have done,

06:52we have made a decision right from the day one

06:54that all of our electric buses

06:56are equipped with bidirectional charging.

06:59When the buses finish the transportation

07:01at the end of the day, they come back to the lot,

07:03they get plugged into the grid

07:05and using our AI driven vehicle to grid technology,

07:09they provide energy back to the grid.

07:12And by doing that,

07:14they actually create a very powerful virtual power plant,

07:17which is powering the homes in a very clean energy way

07:21in the local communities.

07:23So it's such a big win-win-win.

07:25It not only reduces the emissions, the electric vehicle,

07:28but it's also reduces the emissions

07:30and the grid resiliency in the community.

07:33And AI is overseeing a lot of that interchange

07:35to make sure that the power needs match the-

07:39Absolutely, it's an AI driven virtual power plant,

07:41which knows exactly when to charge the buses,

07:44when to discharge them,

07:45and what's the optimal way to do it.

07:47Got it.

07:49Because I warned you earlier that our time would fly

07:52and our time has flown,

07:53but I'd love to know,

07:55Ellie mentioned that you've recently had a new funding round

07:58that among other things,

07:59gave your company unicorn status.

08:00So congratulations.

08:02What are some of the plans?

08:03How do you plan to deploy the new financing?

08:05What are the next steps in the building of the business?

08:08Yeah, absolutely.

08:10I'm proud to say our current round,

08:11last round was led by GSE,

08:13which is a Singapore-based sovereign fund,

08:15but invest globally across the world.

08:18And they look for businesses that can be scaled

08:23and very long-term in outlook.

08:24So we are very proud to partner with them in AI,

08:28using the AI to decarbonize the transportation industry

08:31and make a big impact on society.

08:34And if I were to talk about our plans,

08:36it's the momentum,

08:36essentially momentum and expansion

08:38and momentum and electrification.

08:40We are in 4,000 schools across the country in 14 states.

08:44And we recently announced Oakland

08:46as the first school district in the country

08:49to be 100% electric with bidirectional charging,

08:52giving 2.1 gigawatt hours of energy back to the grid.

08:56So our goal is we are not going to stop

08:59until every child across the globe has that access.

09:02That's really remarkable.

09:04Ritu Narayan, we're so grateful that you're here.

09:06And so I wish you all the best of luck with Zoom.

09:08Please thank her for her time.

09:09It's so great to have her here.

09:10It's such an honor.

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