Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024: How AI Is Making The School Bus Run Smarter, Safer, And Greener
Ritu NARAYAN, Founder and CEO, Zum Moderator: Matt HEIMER, FORTUNE
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TechTranscript
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.