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


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

Conferences

Thank you all for being here and we're so glad Richard that you're here with us. Um I wanna frame things here with a little uh personal story. Uh I have a cousin who's in his early sixties and he drives a school bus in the suburbs of Minneapolis and he swears up and down that the bus that he's driving kids to school uh in every morning and every afternoon uh is the very same school bus that he was riding in in 1974 which is to say, I mean, his initials are carved into the back seat, the whole works, which is all to say that this is an industry. Uh as you might say, school bus transportation is an industry that is ripe for disruption and that is what uh Ritu and Zoom uh have been doing. Uh So tell us a little bit more about how, how you chose this business challenge. You know what, why, what made you decide this is a problem that was urgent to tackle. Yes, thank you, Matt. Excited to be here in Singapore. So Zoom uh also a student transportation problem that has not changed in 80 years. Just you would, as you were describing kids today, pretty much are riding the same way they were riding for the last 80 years or you and I did our grandparents did and a few years back, I was working for ebay when my kids transitioned to school and I was seeing every industry around me getting disrupted, using technology. But when it came to my personal life or picking up and dropping off my Children, uh it was the dark ages and interestingly, 30 years before that my mom who was an educator had left the job for exact same reason. And it was kind of a curiosity of why nothing had changed in this area. So with zoom, what we have done is we have reimagined the entire student transportation by connecting every single stakeholders from parents to Children, to drivers, to operations to schools on one single platform to bring transparency, efficiency, safety, and reliability. And so so to make this work, the the the the Children have an RF ID card. Is that right? That, that tracks their location and it's tracking through a network that uh brings the buses and the schools together. Yes, absolutely. So our routing technology has all the routes in in the system. Drivers are using tablets and when the child is on boarding the bus, they tap to RF ID card. Parent gets notified your child is on boarded, the bus school knows where your Children are and when they get down the bus, they tap the card again and uh they, everybody knows in the system that they have off boarded the bus. It also we have also been able to keep timeliness by doing that by providing this the system across the country. We have 98% plus on time uh arrival and transportation for Children, which matters a lot. Yeah. Yeah, this is, this is good. It's better for attendance, right. It's better keeps the, essentially it improves the education experience for the child and for parents, especially, uh, parents in the service economy with, uh, jobs with the schedules aren't flexible. They don't have to worry about missing a day of work if the kid can't go to school. Absolutely. I mean, you wouldn't believe it's such an antiquated system using paper and pen and, uh, tracking that way that parents used to tell us I can track my package using Amazon. I can track my pizza but I have no idea where my Children are and why is that? So, and that's the problem we are solving because this is an A I centric crowd and it is fortune brainstorm. A I talk a little bit about the role that A I plays in this kind of tech stack that you're bringing to the schools and the parents. Uh, absolutely. A I is central to a business and I'm going to talk about three specific use cases which might be very new to this particular group. The three specific use cases where we use A I is number one is our A I driven routing technology and parent app. The number two is uh is our vehicle to Great Charging program, which I'm going to talk about a little bit. And third is the operational productivity given how many people are involved, thousands of drivers and operational staff, we how we use it. So let me talk about each one of these in a little bit more detail. The first routing technology, what it does very soon in a couple of weeks uh us has a back to school. Hundreds of thousands of students are going to go back and we have to design and redesign the routes for every single school district according to the local conditions. And our routing software is able to create these routes very quickly in record time. What would take months for these school districts and in real time optimize them based on various variable like traffic conditions, the school schedules that are there, the preferences and classes of Children that are happening in different variety of school. And by doing that, we are able to optimize the commute time for students and that is huge. And if heaven forbid a bus were to break down the system could very quickly adapt to that and reroute and scramble to make sure everybody got where they needed to be. Absolutely. And that's, that's the kind of peace of mind. To everybody in the system that no matter what this technology will really help guide and use the existing infrastructure to continue to make the transportation happen every single day. And our parent app basically provides a very accurate eta parents can track as you mentioned, the kids in the real time and they, they know exactly when the bus is arriving when the bus is leaving. And I'm sure a lot of us are parents in this audience and myself as a parent, it is frustrating when you don't know where the bus is. So it brings not only peace of mind to parents and all, all the schools and school districts, but it also reduces the commute time for students and save school money by design the system in such a way that you are using the most optimal size of the vehicle. And the money saving is an urgent point too for public schools in the United States which are very often quite under-resourced. Um Talk about vehicle to grid. That's um many of the buses in the fleet that you're introducing are electric. Uh How does the V two G system work? What's it designed to do? Yeah, absolutely. I would love to share with you that electric school buses are having a moment. And the reason for this is electric school buses are school buses are the ideal asset to be electrified. They are largest battery on wheels typically 4 to 6 times of Tesla battery. And they are one of those uh transportation vehicles that have very unique commute pattern commute locally and they're not used for transportation in the peak demand of energy, which is typically evenings and summertime. So what we have done, we have made a decision right from the day one, that all of our electric buses are equipped with bidirectional charging. When the buses finish the transportation. At the end of the day, they come back to the loft, they get plugged into the grid and using our A I driven vehicle, the grid technology, they provide energy back to the grid. And by doing that, we, they actually create a very powerful virtual power plant which is powering the homes in, in a very clean energy way in the local communities. So it's such a big win, win, win. It not only reduces the emissions, the electric vehicle, but it's also reduces emissions and the grid resiliency in the community. And A I is overseeing a lot of that interchange to make sure that the power needs match the Absolutely. It's the A I driven virtual power plant which knows exactly when to charge the bus buses, when to discharge them. And what's the optimal way to do it? Got it because uh I I warned you earlier that our time would fly and our time has flown. But I'd love to know. Uh Ellie mentioned that you've recently had uh a new funding round that among other things gave your company unicorn status. So, congratulations. Um What are some of the plans? How do you plan to deploy the new financing? What are the next steps uh in the building of the business? Yeah, absolutely. Uh I'm proud to say our current round. Last round was led by GSE which is a Singapore based sovereign Fund, but invest globally across the world and they look for businesses that are, that are scale can be scaled and very long term in outlook. So we are very proud to partner with them in A I using the A I to decarbonize the transportation industry and make a big impact on society. And if I were to talk about our plans, it's the momentum, essentially momentum and expansion and momentum and electrification. We are in 4000 schools across the country in 14 states and we recently announced Oakland is the first uh school district in the country to be 100% electric with bidirectional charging, giving 2.1 gigawatt hours of energy back to the grid. So our goal is we are not going to stop until every child across the globe has that access. That's really remarkable, rich Narayan. We're so grateful, so grateful that you're here. And so I wish you all the best of luck with Zoom. Uh Please thank her for her time. It's so great to have her here. Such an honor. Thank you.