2026 Telematics Report Reveals What Comes After Adoption
90% of fleets currently use telematics. Discover how top safety leaders are turning that data into real risk reduction, and what's still standing in the way of full impact.
How Fleets, Brokers, and Insurers Are Using Telematics to Manage Risk
We've partnered with the Risk & Insurance Education Alliance and IoT Insurance Observatory on our fourth annual Telematics Report. This year's findings combine survey responses from 740 industry professionals with an analysis of more than 135 million real-world telematics events. Discover what stood out this year, and what it means for the industry moving forward.
Distracted Driving is the Top Profitability Threat
Insurers and brokers no longer treat distracted driving as a secondary concern. 84% name it a top threat to commercial auto profitability, tied with litigation and nuclear verdicts.
That concern shows up in the data. Distraction isn't confined to nights or slow periods. Nearly three-quarters of it happens before 6 pm, right in the middle of a standard workday. It's also concentrated in certain sectors: construction fleets record more than double the distraction rate of any other industry.
Telematics Adoption Has Reached Critical Mass
35% of fleets have used telematics for six to 10 years, while only 5% adopted it in the last 12 months. That gap shows an industry past the adoption phase and focused on getting more value from the data it already has.
Safety is the leading use case at 83%. But interpreting and acting on that data is still difficult, with 53% of fleets calling it an ongoing challenge.
Explore How These Trends Compare to Last Year's 2025 Telematics Report
AI Is Becoming Telematics' Interpretation Layer
Fleets that struggle to interpret their telematics data are starting to turn to AI. Current AI usage is concentrated around risk intelligence, with 34% of fleets using it to analyze risk data and 31% to interpret camera footage.
While a growing number of fleets view AI as one of the highest-impact safety technologies, deployment is still early. 40% of fleets aren't using AI in operations at all, and the biggest barrier isn't access: it's trust, with 48% citing accuracy concerns as their top hesitation.
Fleets Aren't Sharing Telematics Data. Most Were Never Asked.
Only 35% of fleets share their telematics data with an insurer or broker, even though adoption itself is near-universal. Most non-sharers, 64%, say the reason is simple: no one asked.
Insurers and brokers see it differently. 52% assume fleets' biggest hesitation is distrust of the insurance industry, but only 5% actually do. That is a 47-point gap between perception and reality.