Three Ways AI Can Make a Huge Difference in Your Heavy Equipment Rental Business
Heavy equipment rental companies are positioning themselves for growth in 2025 by implementing artificial intelligence (AI) and automation tools. Love it or hate it, learning how to make AI work for your business is critical in the modern age.
Recently, Josh Nickell, Former Vice President of the Equipment Segment at the American Rental Association (ARA) and Adam Kropf, Senior Director of Product at Texada Software, sat down to discuss AI. During their conversation, they revealed three novel AI use cases that they believe will make a large impact in the year ahead.
Each of these are well-positioned to become useful, everyday capabilities in the near future.
1. Jumpstart Your Team with Fast & Accurate Insights
For many equipment rental businesses, limited resources will always be a challenge. AI helps your team focus on the important, revenue-generating activities, by providing sorely needed business insights without sacrificing working hours.
“Teams can use generative AI tools for website analysis,” said Nickell. “You can have a solution review [any number of your] competitors’ websites based on yours. I can compare the strengths and weaknesses and then get some examples of how I can improve the SEO on my website to lean into my strengths and be more competitive.”
By using AI to analyze data, rental businesses can build on their digitization and automation achievements to stay one step ahead of the competition and boost their bottom line.
2. Maximize Revenue with Proactive Equipment Performance Analysis
Acoustic emission (AE) is a technique used in structural monitoring that makes assessments by recognizing sounds. AI is able to reduce the guesswork when analyzing these sounds. By using sound data, AI tools can troubleshoot machine performance issues, know when to perform maintenance, or predict breakdowns.
“You’ve got companies out there that are using audio signals on cranes to detect issues with maintenance,” said Nickell.
“It’s expensive and difficult to maintain a crane because you have to get up into the air to understand what’s happening. Cranes make a lot of noises. The metal creaks, the wires whine, and different tensions emit different sounds. So, they’ve got devices that are sitting on these cranes learning what this particular crane sounds like, and can assess when the crane is malfunctioning.”
Using the audio information, AI can make predictive assumptions about the state of the equipment health.
3. Accelerate Profit with Maintenance, Repair, and Troubleshooting
Nickell believes AI can quickly deliver value in the area of equipment maintenance and repair.
“One of the AI use cases that I think will be a big value-add long term, and that we’re really on the cusp of realizing, is equipment maintenance and repair,” he said.
“On some levels it’s concepts like predictive maintenance, but also things that are a lot closer, like repair and troubleshooting. Using generative AI, I typed in that I have a Bobcat T190 that’s overheating and asked what could be wrong. It gave me some really good results. Then I asked how I can check for which one of those results is the root cause, and it gave me the right answer.”
As the accuracy of AI improves, equipment rental houses can look forward to expanding their business advantage. But that’s not their only pathway to growth; the 2025 Rental Report details how rental companies are staying ahead by leveraging digitization, automation, and e-Commerce, as well as AI, to unlock new growth opportunities.
February 6, 2025
5 minutes read
