Mobility is entering a period of profound change. Fleets are becoming more connected, electrification is reshaping operating models, and artificial intelligence is making it possible to manage increasingly complex transportation networks in real time. Yet technology alone does not create better mobility. The real opportunity lies in connecting sophisticated technology with the operational realities of the people and businesses responsible for moving vehicles, goods, and passengers every day.
For Dor Shay, CTO of Element Mobility and Autofleet and Head of Element’s Innovation Hub, that opportunity has been at the heart of his leadership journey. His work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, fleet operations, electrification, and enterprise transformation, with a particular focus on making advanced technology practical for asset-heavy mobility businesses. Through Autofleet, he has helped develop systems capable of using AI and advanced algorithms to manage the enormous complexity created by millions of moving parts across modern transportation networks.
Today, Dor’s perspective is shaped by both technology and experience on the ground. He believes the future of mobility will be built through connected ecosystems in which AI, IoT, automation, infrastructure, and human expertise work together rather than operating as isolated capabilities. His approach is deliberately pragmatic: understand the operation, test ideas through measurable steps, learn quickly, and scale what works.
Recognizing the Need for a New Mobility Model
The decision to build Autofleet emerged from two observations about where transportation was heading. Dor and his co-founders recognized that mobility was approaching a major transformation and that fleet operators would play a central role in shaping it. At the same time, they saw a clear gap between technology companies with advanced capabilities but limited operational knowledge and fleet businesses that understood transportation deeply but often lacked access to state-of-the-art technology.
Fleet operators were managing enormous operational value while working through disconnected systems, manual processes, and decisions that struggled to keep pace with changing demand. Transportation itself was becoming more complicated as new services, vehicle types, business models, and regulations entered the equation. Technology was increasingly becoming the only practical way to manage that complexity at scale.
Autofleet was created to bridge that gap. Its purpose was not simply to digitize existing fleet processes, but to help asset-heavy fleets deliver more optimized and sustainable transportation services by applying AI to the millions of decisions involved in daily operations.
Keeping AI Accountable in the Operation
From the beginning, Dor’s approach to AI has been grounded in a clear principle: technology should strengthen human judgment rather than obscure it. AI can handle repetitive decisions and computationally intensive challenges such as routing, demand forecasting, vehicle assignment, and identifying operational exceptions. Human operators, however, remain responsible for strategic priorities, business trade-offs, and decisions requiring contextual judgment.
That balance depends on transparency. An AI system managing critical fleet operations cannot function as a black box. Operators need to understand why a recommendation was produced, which constraints were considered, and what consequences may follow if they intervene. Within Autofleet, for example, managers can evaluate how manually adding a delivery could influence other estimated arrival times before approving the change.
Business rules, service commitments, vehicle capabilities, safety requirements, and compliance policies are incorporated into the decision-making process, creating clear boundaries around automation. AI provides speed and scale, while people retain control over exceptions and accountability for outcomes. At the same time, AI has expanded Autofleet’s R&D capacity, allowing the team to respond faster to changing client requirements and new market demands.
Turning Electrification Into an Operating Strategy
Dor also sees a need to challenge simplistic assumptions about electric fleet adoption. Electrification is not simply a matter of purchasing electric vehicles. It changes routing, dispatching, depot operations, charging schedules, and infrastructure requirements, making the transition an operational transformation rather than a procurement exercise.
Charging itself introduces another layer of complexity. Installing additional chargers does not automatically solve the problem. Fleets must consider available grid capacity, charger location and speed, queuing, energy prices, driver behaviour, and the periods during which vehicles can be removed from service. In some cases, improving the utilization of existing power and infrastructure can deliver a better outcome than simply building more capacity.
Total Cost of Ownership must also be evaluated according to the specific operation. High-utilization fleets can benefit significantly from lower energy and maintenance costs, while poorly managed charging downtime can undermine those advantages. Dor therefore advocates modelling electrification against actual routes, demand, infrastructure, and service requirements before introducing EVs in phases supported by evidence.
Leading From the Ground Up
Scaling a mobility technology company has required Dor Shay to remain close to the realities of the operation, even as Autofleet has grown beyond its early startup environment. For him, dashboards and reports can reveal performance, but they rarely explain the full story behind it. One of the clearest lessons came from an early airport deployment, when he visited the operation overnight and joined the drivers’ WhatsApp group. Seeing the workday unfold firsthand gave him insights that no management dashboard could provide and reinforced his belief that leadership sometimes means leaving the boardroom to understand what is actually happening on the ground.
That proximity also shapes how Dor approaches growth. Rather than attempting to perfect an entire solution before deployment, he favors small, incremental steps that can be measured, tested, and adapted. Experiments may fail, but failure becomes useful when the risk is controlled and the learning is immediate. The same principle applies to partnerships. Future mobility is too complex for any single organization to build independently, making collaboration with customers, technology providers, infrastructure companies, and other specialists essential. As Autofleet became part of Element, Dor also recognized that the operating model had to evolve. The informal playbook that works for a small company cannot simply be carried into a larger enterprise; managers must continually reassess how the organization should operate at its current scale and focus.
Measuring Mobility by the Value It Creates
For Dor, success in fleet technology cannot be reduced to efficiency alone. Cost reduction matters, but it must coexist with sustainability, customer experience, and the broader transformation of mobility. A fleet is an interconnected system, and improving one metric while damaging another rarely creates durable value. The more meaningful measure is whether operators can extract greater value from the assets they already have: serving more demand without immediately adding vehicles, reducing downtime, and spending less time moving information between disconnected systems.
This perspective extends to the workforce as well. When connected data, optimization, and automation work effectively, employees can move away from repetitive coordination and devote more attention to improving the business. Fleets can introduce cleaner vehicles and maintain them on schedule without sacrificing reliability or profitability. Yet Dor also sees another dimension of success that is harder to capture in conventional metrics: peace of mind. Fleet management can become chaotic when demand shifts, vehicles become unavailable, or information is scattered across systems. Giving operators confidence that their fleet is functioning smoothly, with greater visibility and control, represents a meaningful outcome in its own right.
Making Sustainability Operational
Dor approaches sustainability through the same operational lens. He does not view it as a separate environmental initiative that sits alongside the business; it has to reinforce the business itself. Many of the most effective emissions reductions can also improve financial performance. Reducing empty mileage lowers energy consumption and operating costs, while better vehicle utilization can enable companies to meet demand with fewer assets. Smarter routing can shorten distances while improving service, creating environmental and commercial benefits simultaneously.
The same logic applies to electrification planning. By coordinating charging and understanding how vehicles actually operate, fleets can introduce electric vehicles without compromising availability, revenue, or customer commitments. Simulation provides another important layer, allowing operators to test different vehicle mixes, routes, charging strategies, depot locations, and infrastructure requirements before committing significant capital. This can prevent fleets from overbuilding charging infrastructure or selecting vehicles that do not match their real duty cycles.
Ultimately, Dor believes sustainability has to be sustainable in the broadest sense. An environmentally stronger operation will only scale when it is also operationally effective and financially sound. By embedding sustainability into decisions about utilization, routing, infrastructure, and fleet planning, organizations can make environmental progress part of everyday performance rather than treating it as a separate objective.
Connecting the Intelligent Mobility Ecosystem
The next stage of mobility will depend on how effectively its individual systems communicate with one another. Dor sees the industry already moving toward a connected ecosystem in which vehicles, drivers, chargers, depots, infrastructure, and customer platforms contribute to a shared operational picture. Autofleet’s API-first approach supports this direction by treating fleet operations as an integrated system rather than a collection of isolated tools. Telematics provide continuous visibility into vehicles, while applications connect the people and infrastructure surrounding them. AI can then transform those signals into predictions and decisions, with automation turning those decisions into action.
Over the next five years, Dor expects customer platforms to feed increasingly into this shared operational context. AI will be able to anticipate demand, assign vehicles, schedule charging and maintenance, identify emerging risks, and manage exceptions in real time. Autonomous vehicles will accelerate this convergence because removing the driver also removes the primary human sensor and troubleshooter within the vehicle. That will increase the importance of centralized oversight, automated workflows, remote support, and collaboration between technology and service providers. For Dor, the successful mobility ecosystem will therefore need to be open, interoperable, transparent, and designed around the realities of fleet operations.
Turning Crisis Into a New Growth Path
Autofleet’s own history demonstrates how quickly those realities can change. As a young company initially focused on passenger transportation, it faced an existential challenge when COVID-19 caused demand from clients to fall almost to zero overnight. Instead of waiting for the market to recover, the team reconsidered where its technology could create immediate value. Within three weeks, Autofleet launched a pilot focused on last-mile delivery, rapidly adapting its capabilities to a completely different operational environment.
The pivot demonstrated the resilience and flexibility of the underlying technology, but it also changed the trajectory of the business. It accelerated the expansion of Autofleet’s offering and opened a lasting market that became an important part of its growth. Today, Dor points to the technology powering operations for one of the world’s largest postal providers, supporting the delivery of more than five million parcels each day, as an example of how that period of uncertainty ultimately created a new foundation for scale.
Starting Before the Perfect Moment
The lesson Dor draws from that experience is also central to his advice for entrepreneurs and technology leaders: the perfect moment rarely arrives. The better approach is to begin with a real and important problem, remain close to the people doing the work, and define a focused experiment with clear measures of success. Rather than attempting to build the final vision immediately, leaders can take small steps, learn from evidence, and expand what works.
Failure is part of that process, but a well-designed experiment can turn failure into information without placing the entire business at risk. Dor also emphasizes the importance of choosing the right partners and building on existing knowledge, infrastructure, and market experience. Starting something new does not mean doing everything alone. It means creating the first opportunity to learn something that waiting could never teach.
Leaving a More Connected Mobility Future
Dor’s broader ambition is to help establish a new standard for mobility in which operational waste, disconnected data, and constant manual intervention are no longer accepted as unavoidable. Technology, in his view, should become a trusted and transparent operational layer rather than a novelty placed on top of existing processes. Its role is to connect information, evaluate competing tradeoffs, and help people act more effectively.
The outcomes reach beyond efficiency. Better-connected operations can create stronger businesses, improved customer experiences, more sustainable transportation, and employees with greater time for strategic and creative work. Through Autofleet and Element’s Innovation Hub, Dor sees an opportunity to build a collaborative mobility ecosystem in which fleets, startups, OEMs, infrastructure providers, and technology companies contribute complementary expertise. The ultimate goal is to turn innovation into reliable, scalable operations and demonstrate that the most meaningful advances in mobility happen when sophisticated technology is connected to disciplined execution.
For Print and Design Purpose:
Quotes:
“Autofleet was created to help asset-heavy fleets deliver optimized, sustainable transportation services by using AI to manage the complexity of millions of moving parts.”
“The perfect moment rarely arrives. Begin with a real problem that is important enough for someone to help you solve it.”
“Technology should not remain a novelty added on top of an organization. It should become a trusted and transparent operational layer that connects information, evaluates complex trade-offs, and helps people act more effectively.”
