Turning Truck Drivers Into Players

What we talked about.

Jefferson, founder and CEO/CTO of Game Truck, joins Sunny Ray from Sao Paulo to explain how his company turns fleet telemetry into driver behavior change. After years inside Alper, one of Brazil's largest insurance consultancies, leading IT projects and digital transformation, Jefferson grew frustrated watching data pile up without changing outcomes on the road. Game Truck answers that gap as an operational behavior intelligence platform that combines telematics, predictive and generative AI, and gamification to turn drivers into the protagonists of their own safety record. The platform, now running on more than 5000 vehicles in Brazil, analyzes dozens of telemetry events per truck daily and sends personalized coaching messages instead of generic dashboards. Customers report fewer accidents, lower fuel costs, and better driver retention. Jefferson discusses why static dashboards fail operators, why the real challenge is changing mindset rather than collecting more data, and why he still believes human drivers, not autonomous trucks, will define the industry's next decade. He also shares how Game Truck is expanding into Canada, the US, and parts of Europe as it prepares a new funding round.

A Brazilian insurance veteran built an AI and gamification platform that turns truck telemetry into safer, happier drivers.

The questions, and the answers.

Can you tell us what Game Truck is and what you're building?

Game Truck is an operational behavior intelligence platform, a SaaS layer that pulls data from telematics, cameras, GPS, and TMS systems. We use predictive and generative AI to analyze that data and gamification to turn driving into a competition, like being second or first on a leaderboard. It reduces speeding, hard braking, and accidents without adding new hardware, drivers just use the app.

You spent years at Alper, a major insurance consultancy, leading IT projects and digital transformation. What did that experience teach you about risk that most software founders never learn?

Before Game Truck, I was part of more than 10 companies, some failed and some succeeded, and I spent time at Alper, a big insurance company, working on risk software. That experience showed me how expensive accidents really are for a business. I left Alper with a partner and sponsor to build Game Truck two years ago, because I realized gamification plus AI was the missing piece insurance alone could never fix.

You've said the biggest misconception in your space is that more data leads to better decisions. When did you realize dashboards were failing operators?

Dashboards are like a control tower, but they're showing old data, information from two minutes ago, ten minutes ago, or even a day ago. That's too slow for a fast moving situation. I had a customer whose dashboard never flagged risk in time and one of their trucks crashed. Dash cams help but raise privacy concerns with drivers. A dashboard alone just doesn't work anymore, you need something acting on the data in real time.

Why does connecting data to human behavior beat just giving managers better visibility?

Every driver's behavior is different, so a generic Monday morning message from a manager doesn't really change anything. Game Truck's AI analyzes each driver's data and sends a unique, personalized message to every person. Changing mindset takes time, sometimes a week, sometimes a month, but with consistent personalized coaching we've seen fleets go from having several high risk drivers to almost none within a month.

What's the real financial impact? Are the gamification points tied to real rewards?

For transportation companies, we see savings of 1 to 10 percent of a company's operating value, from reduced fuel and maintenance costs when drivers brake and accelerate less aggressively. That matters a lot right now because freight prices are low almost everywhere in the world, so margins are tight. It's not just about safety, better driving behavior directly improves the finances of the business.

What failure or dead end along the way most sharpened your thinking?

I've learned that solving one problem just creates the next one. Ten years ago the problem was having no data, now everyone has data and the new problem is AI. People ask about autonomous trucks, California, Florida, Ontario are all testing driverless vehicles, but I don't believe in that future. A truck is like your house, you still need a human inside it. Good drivers, not driverless trucks, are what really changes the industry.

For someone hearing about Game Truck for the first time, what does it actually do for a fleet operator day to day?

A fleet manager or coordinator doesn't have time to review everyone's data manually, especially with 100 or more drivers. Each truck generates 15 to 17 telemetry events and about 10 megabytes of data a day, way too much for someone to read in a spreadsheet. Game Truck analyzes all of that automatically and gives the manager a simple report, showing which drivers need a direct coaching conversation and which ones are doing well.

What does international expansion look like for a platform built on Brazilian trucking culture? Does the playbook translate to other markets?

The culture is different, but the playbook translates fine. We're expanding into Canada, the US, Mexico, France, Italy, and Portugal, and the product already supports Portuguese, English, French Canadian, Spanish, Italian, German, and Dutch. In Canada we noticed a lot of Indian truck drivers, so now we're adding that language too. Installation is simple everywhere, there's no new hardware required, just the Game Truck software.