Cox Enterprises Innovation & Technology Culture

What types of products or services does your engineering team work on/create? What problem are you solving for customers?

Our entire product and technology group is encouraged and expected to use AI in their respective roles. So, we’re big AI adopters; we’re very committed and on the cutting edge of using AI. 

My team is actually the AI accelerator team, and we’re within the data science org. Our customers are really internal partners at this point who are building products for our customers. We have been tasked with going around the business and identifying opportunities either to build AI into products or to create new workflows to help automate processes with AI. We’ve got a few different agentic AI solutions.

Tell us about a recent project where your team used AI as a tool. What was it meant to accomplish? How did you use AI to assist?

One example is what we’re doing for our fleet services team, which repairs heavy duty trucks and trailers that break down on the side of the road. We’re helping them create repair estimates using AI to search through parts availability information. So, if an 18-wheeler broke down, our tools can search and tell them, “For this kind of vehicle, you’re recommended to use these parts, which cost this much and are available at this place.” That allows them to quickly create these estimates and send them off to the shop so they can actually start the repair. It’s automating that whole process of identifying what the issue is and figuring out what actual parts they should use in order to make that repair.

What would that project have looked like if you didn't have AI as a tool to use? How has AI changed the way you work, in general?

AI not only makes the processes faster but also helps really improve them as well, because we’re able to use data that they wouldn’t be aware of otherwise. For the fleet services estimates, we’re able to search through and see where their deals are for different shops or how much these parts cost historically. So, they have access to more data now, too, just because we’re connected to all that with AI.