Navigating 2025 fleet management trends: Actionable strategies for solution providers

Although fleet management is often perceived as a more mature and traditional business function, it continues to evolve at a fascinating pace today. Breakthrough technologies, combined with increased efficiency, regulatory, and safety demands, transform modern fleet management systems and unlock lucrative fleet digitalization opportunities. 

With these technological advancements, serious operational challenges may follow; here are just a few to name: 

• The demand for more complex systems with advanced architecture and multiple data stream integration.
• The development of BI tools and dashboards for data-driven decision-making on a leadership level.
• Delivery of timely actionable insights while narrowing notifications to the right volume.
• Broader market pressures, including rising sustainability demands and electrification goals, alongside the global driver shortage, fluctuating vehicle prices, and geopolitical crises — all requiring a comprehensive, strategic approach to remain competitive.

Succeeding in this environment requires resilience and flexibility for fleet managers and solution providers. 

Read on for our considerations and advice for 2025, based on the analysis of market trends and industry research, complemented by insights gathered from leading conferences throughout 2024. We hope this distilled list of strategies, reflecting the key directions shaping fleet management, will help you grow and strengthen your business as a provider of fleet management solutions.

Aliaksandr Kuushynau
Head of Wialon

“This article was written by Mariya Filimanchuk, the Head of Wialon Innovation and Strategy Hub, a new entity that appeared in Wialon in 2024 as a much-needed response to the evolving landscape of fleet management. 

At Wialon, our mission is to transform businesses through fleet digitalization, providing advanced solutions that drive growth and efficiency across industries. Our vision is to shape the future of fleets worldwide, empowering organizations of every size to thrive. Maryia’s team ensures that Wialon not only evolves with industry trends but continues to be a trusted partner for fleets navigating an ever-changing market.”

1. Portfolio expansion with advanced services and solutions

As creatively presented at the Wialon partner community reunion in Dubai in 2024, telematics services are facing the need to evolve from basic GPS tracking to sophisticated tools offering data-driven insights for businesses. 

Affordable telematics options offering essential features to help companies adhere to regulations and boost overall efficiency will still have their share of the market.

But if we’re talking about retaining your position and even expanding your business as a technology provider in 2025 and beyond, if we’re talking about rising above commoditization, it’s time to differentiate your business with advanced custom offerings that align closely with customer needs and specific business niches. To honor the trend we observe on the market and expect to stay in the upcoming years, we keep pushing our product and the community to adapt and prepare for these changes. 

Industry and region-tailored solutions

Customized solutions usually require more effort and might be more challenging to scale, but this approach strengthens your competitiveness in the market and contributes to clients' satisfaction rates. 

Solution providers may expect higher revenue due to project complexity and a longer customer lifetime. In addition, advanced solutions often require more implementation and integration jobs, training, ongoing support, maintenance assistance, and consulting, all of which generate additional revenue streams.

See how a service provider offered not only a fleet management solution for the client but also the necessary infrastructure to make servicing the local California requirements possible:

➡️ GPS fleet tracking solution that meets CARB requirements

Upselling opportunities

Over time, businesses utilizing basic, affordable telematics services may recognize the importance of taking the next step in fleet digitalization. These businesses become ready to move from entry-level functionality up the ladder at some point.

While service providers may accelerate this journey, the ultimate goal is to anticipate this request and offer additional services or functionality on top of the utilized solution. Position yourself as a solutions architect helping fleets transition to increasingly intelligent systems.

Here’s a good example: a real-life project of switching to a more comprehensive vessel fuel monitoring system. Upgrading the solution allowed for actual results for the end customer business:

➡️ Fuel monitoring system for vessels

2. Customer service excellence as a market differentiator 

Beyond hardware, software, or anything else, fleets increasingly value a partner who can guide them through strategic shifts and challenges.

Aside from offering tailored solutions and anticipating business needs, keeping current operations as effective and uninterrupted as possible is crucial. For solution providers, great customer experience could refer to:

• Minimizing downtime during the installations
• Offering extensive training and onboarding after deployment and on demand
• Providing guidance on platform updates and educating about current features
• Providing 24/7 support
• Providing custom documentation
• If the project doesn't suit your portfolio, referring potential clients to the vendors you trust.

Try to go the extra mile — your reputation will be your strong, lasting asset. 

3. Rethinking driver management approach: from monitoring to empowerment

Driver shortages continue to challenge the global transportation industry. Service providers may consider repositioning fleet digitalization solutions as a driver support mechanism rather than a surveillance tool to help clients foster driver loyalty and improve retention. Safety tools and driver performance insights can become a positive feedback loop, benefiting drivers and fleet owners. 

Narrative shift 

In regions with a critical shortage of drivers, businesses are already endorsing these changes. The industry is shifting from driver monitoring to driver safety, and solution providers should understand and speak the same language. You may be the voice of the new narrative, getting it to your clients and ultimately improving the agreeability of their employees towards new solutions.

Here’s an excellent example of a fleet digitalization platform being used for driver’s safety in harsh conditions in the Arctic. Apart from sound alarms, satellite connection solving the problem of poor GSM signal coverage in remote areas, and video telematics, the safety solution offered a four-button alert system so that the drivers could signal something’s wrong in a matter of seconds and get help as fast as possible:

➡️ Driver safety monitoring system for eco driving monitoring

Positive reinforcement programs 

It doesn't stop at the narrative. Businesses are moving from penalties for poor driving to eco-driving bonuses and rewards, and there are a few beneficiaries of this shift. Again, service providers would also profit from a more affirmative attitude toward implementing new technologies. Drivers who feel valued rather than punished are more likely to remain at their workplace, enhancing overall service quality and reducing the company's turnover costs.

Here’s a real-life example of driver scoring that perfectly illustrates this strategy. It was implemented not for punishing per se but rather for identifying those who perform better and comply with the requirements to reward them. Drivers who made some mistakes are identified to primarily educate and improve their skills:

➡️ Eco Driving solution for a Polish transportation company

4. Embracing a comprehensive view of fleet operations

To stay competitive in 2025, solution providers and system integrators must embrace a holistic approach to fleet operations. Moving beyond isolated metrics, the focus should shift toward integrating telematics data with broader business insights to empower fleet managers with a comprehensive view. This strategy enhances operational efficiency, improves decision-making, and aligns fleet performance with overarching business objectives like cost reduction, sustainability, and customer satisfaction.

A comprehensive fleet management approach goes beyond telematics data alone. It’s about integrating diverse data sources — such as CRM systems, ERP platforms, and others — into a unified business ecosystem. The true value lies not in isolated figures or reports but in how these numbers align with broader business KPIs and strategies. By connecting telematics insights with other critical business data, companies can move from standalone reports to a fully integrated operational framework, enabling proactive strategies like predictive maintenance, real-time route optimization, and tailored driver engagement programs.

5. AI integration 

In 2025, AI is no longer just a buzzword or something uniquely applicable to technological companies. From trivial personal use to enterprise-wide projects, it’s not a question of whether to use AI but how to best apply it to improve most business operations.

Daily operations and repetitive tasks 

Start the year by listing your organization's processes and assessing how time-consuming and repetitive they are. Look at the basic repetitive operations and prioritize AI integration for frequent ones that require serious resources and effort. 

Implementing AI tools is not specific to fleet management operations but rather universal to any business. It encompasses anything from translations, audio transcription and summarization, data analysis, code-writing assistance, image generation, video editing, sentiment analysis, and beyond. You might be surprised by the many possible applications AI tools offer today. 

Here’s a recent talk by Aliaksei Shchurko, CEO at Gurtam, the company behind Wialon, where he explains the principles of building automation tools based on the current AI skills:

Gurtam meetups: Engineering GenAI: Building Production-Ready Automation Tools

AI-backed customer support 

Hopefully, the heading didn't scare some away, especially those who tend to underestimate AI possibilities. The key is to avoid completely swapping a customer support team with AI in favor of building the infrastructure that helps a customer service team be even more successful. 

With AI chatbots, businesses can provide 24/7 customer support for frequently asked questions or basic troubleshooting. This allows human support agents to focus on more complex issues and eventually offer better service. 

Moreover, AI tools not only reduce the amount of money spent on customer support with better quality, but they also increase the satisfaction level of employees, which, in turn, has a positive influence on customer satisfaction and the financial well-being of the company.

Wialon is entering 2025 by releasing AI tools to help our partners receive relevant information faster. 

We encourage our partners to join us and explore this line of optimization and automation to seek ways of increasing their profit margins. Here’s an example from the Wialon community: Teltonika, the hardware manufacturer, shares their experience of automating technical support:

Gurtam meetups: Practical aspects of automating technical support at Teltonika

Brainstorm and prototype 

Using AI makes a big difference when one stumbles upon a complex problem or needs a quick visualization tool. AI-based services can multiply one's creative capacity, speed up iteration cycles, and quickly validate concepts before committing significant resources. 

Use AI to generate ideas or visualize concepts, draft marketing copy, build interactive prototypes, etc. Keep going if you have not been lucky with the first AI tool you've tried. This article's author was researching AI slide generation services, and the best one was not even in the first five tested.

And using out-of-the-box AI platforms is often the least we can do for an organization. A Stanford professor explains why compound systems with multiple interacting components rather than large pre-trained foundation and standalone models can achieve superior results:

Stanford Webinar - Large Language Models Get the Hype, but Compound Systems Are the Future of AI

6. Shifting the business mindset

All of this will become just another trend article unless we take action to implement these strategies and unlock their potential to drive meaningful change. 

While navigating this landscape may be challenging, it also presents remarkable opportunities for telematics service providers, system integrators, and other companies providing fleet management solutions. By embracing advanced technologies, diversifying their service portfolios, shifting the narrative around driver management, and delivering comprehensive operational insights, they can keep pace with industry shifts and prosper and grow with them. 

Aliaksandr Kuushynau
Head of Wialon

“Many telematics service providers are concerned that the ease of purchasing and self-installing GPS trackers and the rise of OEM telematics systems could threaten their role. However, we encourage to view these challenges as opportunities to broaden their service offerings and redefine their roles — not just as equipment suppliers, but as strategic partners for fleet owners.”

We’ll help you on the way

Staying relevant in this environment requires business flexibility, a commitment to growth, and a strong community of like-minded partners, companies, and experts. The Wialon team will continue to support its partners with dedicated Project Implementation and Partner Growth specialists, allowing support with project execution, training, and certification. 

Moreover, our partners are warmly welcomed at Wialon community reunions worldwide and the Telematics and Connected Mobility conference in Vilnius, where they can enjoy unique networking opportunities and cutting-edge industry insights to stay ahead of the game. 

Whether you’re already part of our community or not, subscribe to our blog and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to stay updated about all the latest innovations at Wialon.