Advertising Feature
Predicting The Unpredictable - How Technology Is Taming Winter Gritting
As OUTCO’s winter services business celebrates its 20th year anniversary, founder and CEO Jason Petsch, examines how technology is transforming how organisations control seasonal unpredictability.
In the FM world we often hear talk about the transformational impacts of AI. While clearing snow, gritting or de-icing car parks can, on the face of things, appear to be low tech, the high risk nature of protecting businesses from accidents and litigation has made our sector an early adopter of AI tools. Where in the past winter gritting would be about laying down de-icing salt every night on a precautionary basis or – worse – scrambling to get a team out to handle an unexpectedly frosty morning, today’s winters are proactively managed through sophisticated weather models, algorithms and mobile networks. At OUTCO, we have pioneered an approach over the past 20 years in winter services that is now highly automated and highly dependent on AI decision making. Technology has been truly transformational and has been key to giving organisations greater certainty in the face of nature’s volatility.
16 fmuk
Jason Petsch, CEO of OUTCO
While it’s fashionable to speak about artificial intelligence, AI tools are ultimately an evolution of last decade’s hyped technology – ‘Big Data’ which was the genesis of AI algorithms. Since day one, winter gritting services have been driven by weather forecasts so perhaps its unsurprising the sector has become so data-driven. After all, in aiming to predict highly complex weather systems, meteorology has always been at the cutting edge of fields such as supercomputing. As meteorological models have grown more advanced, commercial users of weather data have been able to apply this to better anticipate and respond to weather conditions. At OUTCO we have seen the quality and precision of this forecasting significantly increase and benefit from highly accurate forecasts of ground surface temperatures that are better able to predict frost.
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