6 minute read
Data Driven
Brendan poses on the job with several of FritoLay’s new electric Tesla Semi Trucks.
Brendan Wiggins ’04
“I’ve always loved cars. It’s been a part of my psyche my whole life,” shares Brendan Wiggins ’04
Brendan’s passion inspired him to help start a car club at PVI, a spark that ultimately shaped his career. Today, Brendan is a leader in leveraging data-driven decision-making and AI to innovate and enhance the safety and efficiency of some of the world’s largest vehicle fleets.
“During my sophomore year when we were all getting our driver’s licenses, my friends at PVI were all car guys too,” he reflects on the origins of the Car Club.
“Honestly, we often just hung out and talked about cars: what was coming out, projects we wanted to do, hypotheticals of cars we wanted to build, or what we wanted to do with cars we had. This was right around when the first Fast & Furious movie came out, and we were very focused on tuning cars up, how to make them faster and change various components. We also organized events after school where students could stop by and we’d demonstrate how to change a spare tire. We did quite a bit of safety education, but a lot of the club was us just hanging around, talking about cool cars. We even did a fundraiser where people could smash up an old car for donations.”
This early enthusiasm for cars did not directly influence Brendan’s college studies. After graduating from PVI, he attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and earned a degree in archeology.
“Oddly enough, in 2008, they weren’t hiring a ton of archeologists. Since I’d always been an auto enthusiast, I flip-flopped my hobby and career.” He began working at a local tuning shop that sold performance parts and supported several motorsport racing teams. Brendan even tried his hand at racing, including competing in the iconic Pikes Peak Hill Climb in 2011.
After a few years, Brendan returned to school and earned an MBA in business analytics from Wake Forest University. Shortly after, he was recruited by PepsiCo and moved to Dallas to work with Frito-Lay on vehicle replacement strategy. “It’s an oversimplification, but at what point do you quit fixing an old truck and just buy a new truck — I was involved in the decision-making process for that,” he explains.
All vehicles — from heavy-duty trucks to local delivery vans — fell under Brendan’s purview. Toward the end of his time, he took on managing PepsiCo’s autonomous vehicle program, conducting early testing on self-driving technology. He later shifted focus to the role of machine learning and AI in fleet management, particularly predictive maintenance, which uses vehicle data to anticipate which part might fail next.
“At the time [2016–2018], we really didn’t know if it was going to work. I was involved in some of the really heavy data analytics and machine learning. We got pretty good at some things, such as being able to tell you about two weeks before your battery would fail.”
This role involved extensive collaboration with PepsiCo’s telematics provider. “Telematics is like a GPS tracker, but much more robust. It tracks location, has an accelerometer for driver behavior, and collects all the vehicle data — engine fault codes, check engine lights, and so on. All that went into a company we used called Geotab.”
In 2021, Brendan made the leap to work directly for Geotab. Today, his expertise lies in data-driven decision-making for large vehicle fleets. “I work with the usual suspects like Amazon, UPS, PepsiCo, Hertz, and others. My specialty is extra-large enterprise fleets of about a hundred thousand vehicles or more.”
Brendan notes the similarities between his background in archeology and what he does now. “Similar to archeology, you’re looking at data, looking for small indicators that add up to a bigger picture. Nobody has it all written down for you. You have to read the tea leaves to figure out what is really going on.”
According to Brendan, PVI fostered a strong foundation of critical thinking skills and an inquisitive mindset.
“PVI cultivated curiosity. It was where I got my first exposure to computer programming. A broader curiosity really started at PVI — of diagnosing and science and enjoying education — of me being an academic at heart. I learned to find and validate information.”
Harnessing his curiosity and applying it to new challenges, Brendan explains how emerging technologies like generative AI and machine learning have been able to transform the industry.
“There’s a lot of hype right now around generative AI, like Chat GPT. Machine learning allowed us to take some of the expertise we had, which still required a human to look at the data, and scale them up to a fleet of a hundred thousand vehicles. That was really transformative in our ability to take the next step to making these vehicles safer and more reliable.”
“For the layperson, it’s going to come into play with safety. In a lot of the work we’re doing, there’s a big piece of driver behavior. The machine learning is starting to be able to score and help fleets make better decisions about when to send drivers to certain places or which routes to take.”
Brendan finds his work deeply rewarding, because it enables him to enhance safety and sustainability for some of the largest fleets in the world.
“I get to help make the world safer and greener. We’re helping fleets put the right electric trucks on the right routes, and they buy more because they worked well. We help identify your riskiest drivers, and what behaviors you need to coach to avoid accidents. My influence in the industry has grown to the point where I have a voice to be able to help do that. And that’s important to me.”
Any advice for students as a PVI alumnus? “Yes — people will ask who you want to be, and what you want to do, but you don’t need to know where your path will take you right now. Just know where you want to take the next step. Follow your passions, work hard, and you’ll never be bored along the way!”
