When Thomas Hansen went looking for his next job, he spoke with a string of frontier and vertical AI companies and asked each the same question: Would it have a moat, and would it still be around, in a year or two?
He chose Motive, an AI platform that empowers the people who run physical operations with tools to make their work safer, more productive, and more profitable. Hansen joined in May as president of go-to-market, overseeing sales, marketing, customer success and partnerships.
He spoke with FreightWaves on Oct. 19 at the American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference & Exhibition in Charlotte, North Carolina. That morning, Motive launched Agents, AI that anticipates problems and acts on them automatically. Agents turn the safety and operations data organizations already collect into immediate action.
Hansen’s reason for picking Motive is also how the company sells to fleets choosing among camera vendors. The cameras and the AI models running on them, he argues, give Motive something software-only AI firms lack.
“The thing that was so unique with Motive is the hardware is the moat,” Hansen said. “Once you are in a commercial vehicle with your hardware, whether it’s a 360 set of cams or a dashcam in the cab, in the vehicle, you are in and you’re providing value.”
He compared the model to Gillette’s razors and blades: The hardware goes in first, and Motive earns its money on the software and AI that run on top of it.
Cameras and in-house AI models
Motive has invested in two areas, Hansen said. The first is the cameras: two forward-facing lenses plus one facing the driver. The second is the AI models that run on the device itself, at the edge, which large offshore teams annotate and correct. Motive’s AI Dashcam Plus can run more than 30 of those models at once, according to the company.
“We can’t all be running off an Anthropic model or an OpenAI model. That’s not going to do anything for the industry,” Hansen said. “We have built our own models, running it on the edge. We’re not running off any third party.”
He pointed to the billions of dollars big AI companies spend on training data from firms like Scale AI and Snorkel AI. Motive trains its models on data from its own customers, which the company puts at nearly 100,000.
Hansen said the payoff shows up in side-by-side trials against competitors, which Motive wins “roughly three quarters of the time.” He credited the lenses and how few of the models’ detections are false positives. Motive has not released data behind the figure.
What Agents change for physical operations teams
Agents can open maintenance work orders and bring in managers when an alert meets a fleet’s rules. Calls to drivers from Atlas, Motive’s AI assistant, arrive later this year, the company said at launch.
Hansen said most AI tools stop at insights. “Every morning you have all these things, bots, agents, that’s flowing information to you,” he said. “But the thing is, so what? What do you do with all this information?”
His example is the safety manager who runs a dozen manual driver coaching sessions a day. AI can take over that work, he said, and the manager moves to checking how those AI conversations went or building agents for preventive maintenance. For coaching calls, that waits on Atlas.
“It’s not that AI and agentic is replacing jobs in this industry,” Hansen said. People who handled those manual tasks “can actually now focus on the next level of value add.”
One payoff he named is the insurer: Safety managers can spend more time showing the fleet’s insurance company its safety progress and turning it into savings.
Funding and business momentum
Motive raised more than $1.3 billion from General Catalyst in September and withdrew its IPO filing at the same time. Its annual recurring revenue passed $600 million, up 30% year over year.
Growth will come from the U.S., Canada and Mexico, plus the United Kingdom, where Motive launched in August 2025 and plans to build a base for continental Europe, he said.
“Today it’s a very beginning of the beginning,” Hansen said of fleets’ AI adoption. “The vast majority of the industry is still sitting on legacy technology from vendors that have been around for a long time.”
Why it matters: Physical operations teams don’t lack data. They lack time to act on it. Motive Agents turn the safety and maintenance data fleets already collect into action the moment it matters, so teams spend less time on reports and routine follow-up and more on the field coordination, corrective action and training that make roads safer and cut collision costs.
