Driving America Forward with Adam Kahn
“Zum is also doing everything in service of a bigger goal–and that goal is the same as ours. At the end of the day, all of Zum’s newest features and innovations boil down to: is this thing making it safer and more efficient for a student to get to and from school? If so, Zum’s doing it; if not, they’re not. Full stop.”
Adam Kahn
Chief Marketing Officer
Netradyne
Adam Kahn has worked in the commercial vehicle safety industry for nearly 30 years. Today, he is the Chief Marketing Officer at Netradyne, a company using AI to monitor bus driver performance and improve safety in large bus fleets. An expert in data and telematics, he is a staunch advocate for student and driver safety alike.
How is Netradyne driving innovation forward?
Innovation—it’s a fun, buzzy word. But in my experience, it’s most powerful when it’s grounded in a concrete priority. A reason for innovation.
At Netradyne, all of our innovation comes down to: is this going to make the bus experience safer for students / passengers and drivers alike? If so, then it’s innovation with a purpose, which is part of the Netradyne DNA.
It’s our job to provide school bus drivers with all of the tools necessary to do their job safely—i.e., to get students to and from school safely, and to do that day in and day out. To us, it’s innovation with a focused purpose.
I’ll give you an example. In order to improve driver performance, the other bus fleet managers out there—our competitors—tend to focus on what a driver is doing wrong. That driver gets a report with all of the things they’ve missed during a shift, or throughout a given day. By definition, this makes the driving and evaluation experience punitive.
At Netradyne, we take the opposite approach. We give drivers a “performance score”—called GreenZone—which explicitly highlights all of the things they’re doing right. If they’re driving without distractions, and coming to full stops at stop signs, and not speeding, we call these DriverStars. This program recognizes positive driving and promotes behavior that improves driving performance. Drivers have full access to their scores, which allows for frictionless coaching, and our clients can use the same scores to set goals for their drivers, which creates a fair, positive, and safe work environment.
It’s a small thing, but not all innovations are big—they just have to be in service of your bigger goal.
From your perspective, how is Zum driving America innovation forward?
It’s easy to point out all of the things Zum is doing that are innovative—enhanced bus routing, data about every student and every ride, total visibility for parents and school administrators. For us at Netradyne, a company that runs on data, it’s extremely impressive.
The most impressive thing, though, is that Zum is also doing everything in service of a bigger goal—and that goal is the same as ours. At the end of the day, all of Zum’s newest features and innovations boil down to: is this thing making it safer and more efficient for a student to get to and from school? If so, Zum’s doing it; if not, they’re not. Full stop.
It’s very rewarding to work with partners like Zum who clearly share the same priority set, so it’s always obvious that we’re driving in the same direction.
When you think of the future, what role do children/the next generation play, and how can we set them up for success?
I think, as the adults in the room, it’s our job to make sure these students stay curious for as long as possible. Of course, kids grow up and they lose their childlike wonder, but I’d like to see us extend that window as much as we can—because it’s that curiosity that’s going to enrich the lives of those kids, and make them powerful innovators when they enter the workforce.
One very clear way for us to keep that curiosity alive is to use the very buses we’ve been talking about. Each bus is a technological marvel—the engine, the conversion of fuel into transportation. And that’s before any of the technology—the EV battery, the tablets with GPS, the AI-driven algorithms that set the routes and make it possible to move thousands of students every day, seamlessly.
I’d love to see our companies use these buses and open up the technology to our students—almost like little demo days—to spark interest in technology and innovation, and maybe keep our students’ imaginations going just a little longer.