Penske Truck Leasing’s Fantasy Fleet tool offers a comparison data set made up of the top-performing vehicles most similar to each vehicle in the user’s fleet. (Penske Truck Leasing)
How to maximize the potential of a carrier’s rolling stock is one of the questions that keeps trucking executives up at night.
Penske Truck Leasing believes it has some of the answers with the latest upgrades to its Catalyst AI fleet management platform.
The many millions of fantasy sports league participants worldwide can tinker with their lineups throughout the season, with baseball league team owners especially prone to frantic activity when it comes to underperforming assets.
Juan Soto — the most expensive signing in baseball history, indeed in all sports, after a blockbuster crosstown New York switch in the offseason — was hitting .224 with just 8 home runs for the Mets through the first 55 games of the 2025 season. Soto’s carrier batting average is currently .281.
If Soto were a carrier asset or fleet operations variable, one of Catalyst AI’s upgrades — the Fantasy Fleet tool –– already would have been deployed to fix such a level of underperformance.
“You get a real-life example of what the best out there are doing,” says Haynes, vice president of digital and customer data. (Penske Truck Leasing)
Fantasy Fleet offers a comparison data set made up of the top-performing vehicles most similar to each vehicle in the user’s fleet, helping them find gaps and elevate performance, according to Penske.
The tool finds the best of the best out there, including assessing how the vehicles are being driven and operated, Tim Haynes, vice president of digital and customer data at Penske Truck Leasing, told Transport Topics.
“Now you get a real-life example of what the best out there are doing,” Haynes said in a recent interview, adding that Catalyst gives fleet managers the tools to change their roster for the better in the short and long term.
Catalyst AI was launched in April 2024.
When it was launched, users could see what the fleet was doing, but with the latest enhancements, fleets can now drill down to the vehicle, hub or terminal level to assess the business, Haynes said.
“It is really giving you an ability to see how you’re performing against yourself,” he said.
Catalyst AI is embedded within Comparative Insights, a feature inside Penske’s Fleet Insight digital platform.
Three other key upgrades were introduced in the latest version of Catalyst — vehicle-level comparison, hub-level comparison and impacting metrics.
The last gives fleets the ability to focus on specific metrics that matter most to their business model, be that fuel efficiency, maintenance costs or utilization.
“The new release marks a next chapter for Catalyst AI — one that makes complex data more usable, more scalable and more actionable,” said Art Vallely, president of Penske Truck Leasing.
“We’ve enhanced the platform’s ability to surface trends, benchmark at the vehicle level, and identify meaningful outliers across fleets and facilities,” Vallely added. “Built in-house, the platform was designed to help our customers spend less time chasing data and more time improving performance.”
Robert Brown of Bot Auto breaks down the state of autonomous trucking today, and where it’s headed. Tune in above or by going to RoadSigns.ttnews.com.
Some 70% of companies now report adopting AI solutions, up 17 percentage points from 2024, according to Penske’s 2025 Transportation Leaders Survey: A Road to AI Adoption study, which was released earlier in May.
Haynes, who is based at Penske headquarters in Reading, Pa., and has spent 26 years with the company, has analyzed data — and how it can help fleets — for much of his career.
“It’s not just about the algorithms; it’s about the data. The journey for capturing the data and making sure it is appropriate for use has been a long one,” he said. “It started with fleet managers asking how am I doing? How can I do better?”
The team building Catalyst includes data scientists, analysts and engineers, but also marketing, customer service and information technology employees at Penske, he said, noting that he himself spent many years on the marketing side of the business.
“Catalyst AI now analyzes over 100 billion data points annually,” said Haynes. “We’ve engineered a system that runs more than 300 models in real time — delivering comparison logic, trend detection and scoring that is both scalable and immediate. This release reflects the technical backbone required to help fleets benchmark smarter and respond faster.”
Part of the journey involved looking into what customers thought they wanted, finding out what they actually needed and then working on what they needed, the executive said.
“It’s giving you these levers that you need to keep your vehicles on the road,” he said, including, for instance, making sure maintenance is done at the right time. If maintenance needs to be carried out, Haynes added, Catalyst shows fleet managers when it needs to be done and how it needs to be done so that trucks stay on the roads.
