Before you buy AI, find the VIN
WORDS BY BARRY PRYCE, CTO & CO-FOUNDER, FLEETGURU. AI
Fleets are being sold faster answers. The harder task is connecting the records that make those answers reliable.
I have sat through a lot of AI demonstrations this year. Someone types a question, an answer appears within seconds and the room nods. Nobody asks where the answer came from.
A large language model can produce a confident answer without the evidence to support it. OpenAI’ s own research last year found that standard training rewards guessing over admitting uncertainty. Gartner expects organisations to abandon 60 % of AI projects that lack AI-ready data by the end of this year.
“ If the data has issues, then the data is not ready for AI,” said Roxane Edjlali, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner.
The data is there. The connections are not
Australian fleets do not lack data. AfMA’ s research with Fifth Quadrant found that among fleets in the middle band of analytics maturity, 51 % rate their data quality as insufficient, 48 % report system integration problems and 48 % cannot turn the insights they have into strategy. Fifth Quadrant’ s 2026 follow-up found half the largest operators lack staff able to interpret the data they hold.
Lease costs sit in a lessor portal, maintenance arrives as invoices, fuel on a card statement, tolls and fines in a finance inbox, telematics in a vendor dashboard. Finance reconciles them in Excel once a month. The fleet manager has become a data janitor.
22 ISSUE 61 OCTOBER 2026 / WWW. AFMA. ORG. AU