Penske Truck Leasing has officially announced the launch of Catalyst AI™, which would be the company’s proprietary artificial intelligence engine and industry leading AI platform.
According to certain reports, the stated platform is specifically geared towards fulfilling the needs of commercial transportation, something which it does by applying machine learning in advanced methods. The idea driving this mechanism relates to turning one of the industry’s richest vehicle datasets into faster, more strategic decision-making across operations.
More on that would reveal how Catalyst AI treads up a long distance to help users how to take the right action, at the right time, from the right data.
“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. Built in-house, the platform was designed to help our customers spend less time chasing data and more time improving performance.”
To achieve the given purpose, Penske has introduced four core enhancements. The first enhancement would be fantasy fleet, which offers a new comparison set made up of top-performing vehicles most similar to each vehicle in the user’s fleet, thus helping them find gaps and elevate performance.
Expanding upon the facility to conduct vehicle-level comparisons, it effectively enables users to compare individual vehicles, pinpoint performance differences, and identify where targeted adjustments can drive better results.
Alongside that, users can also come expecting to conduct hub-level comparison. This particular component empowers users to assess operations by location before eventually uncovering opportunities for improved efficiency at the local level.
Another detail worth a mention is rooted in the availability of impacting metrics. The development in question basically gives users the ability to focus on specific metrics that matter most to their business. These metrics may include fuel efficiency, maintenance costs, utilization, and more.
“We’ve designed Catalyst AI with our customers’ needs in mind,” said Sherry Sanger, executive vice president of strategy and marketing at Penske Transportation Solutions. “Catalyst AI represents a strategic leap forward in how fleets use data. It’s not just about visibility—it’s about empowering smarter decisions across the entire network with technology that works in the real world.”
Penske’s latest brainchild also delivers a rather interesting follow-up to the company’s 2025 Transportation Leaders Survey: A Road to AI Adoption, which found that 93% of senior business decision makers in the transportation and logistics industry agree that AI will improve their organization’s resiliency and ability to adapt to sudden shifts.
More than half of respondents further (54%) said the ability to compare their fleet’s performance with others in the same market would improve both efficiency and operational decision-making.
As they specifically plan for today’s continued economic uncertainty, fleet leaders also cited their most critical data needs as: visibility into maintenance costs (44%), fuel price trends (41%), and fleet utilization (36%).
If we talk about organizations that have embraced AI, they are already reaping the benefits, with 40% of respondents said they’ve seen improvements of at least 50% in fuel usage, cost reduction, or distance traveled through smarter routing and optimization. Having said so, 84% of transportation leaders think the industry is lagging behind in AI adoption and 36% only feel somewhat prepared to respond to ongoing supply chain disruptions and economic volatility.
Founded in 1969, Penske’s rise up the ranks stems from its portfolio of solutions which includes full-service truck leasing, fleet maintenance, truck rentals, used trucks, and a comprehensive array of technologies. The company’s excellence in what it does can also be understood once you consider it operates and maintains more than 419,000 vehicles and serves its customers from more than 990 maintenance facilities, as well as more than 2,200 rental locations across North America.
“Catalyst AI now analyzes over 100 billion data points annually,” said Tim Haynes, vice president of digital and customer data at Penske. “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.
