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Two months after going live with IntelliShift AI Dash Cams, the utility installer’s company-wide driver safety score climbed from the 400s to 877.
One of Scope Services’ vehicles got rear-ended. Everyone walked away fine, but corporate fleet manager Joyle Woulfe already knew how these situations usually unfold.
The other driver tells one story. Your driver tells another. It escalates into he hit me, no she hit me, and weeks later somebody else decides who was telling the truth. Meanwhile, your driver carries the doubt around.
That is not what happened. Scope pulled the video and had proof in seconds.
For a company that has spent six decades building its name on safety, that kind of certainty matters. It is also brand new. Scope Services has only had IntelliShift AI Dash Cams fully deployed since the end of May.
Sixty years, zero fatalities
Scope Services has been in business for 60 years and is a nationally certified Women-Owned business founded and led by Lydia Demski. From its base in Saint Joseph, Michigan, the company handles utility installation work, from nuclear power plants to home installations of Smart electric, gas, and water meters, EV Chargers, thermostats, Demand Response Load Control, and battery storage devices. Scope Services also runs a staffing business and performs substation builds /relay panel assembly.
In six decades of that work, Scope Services has recorded zero fatalities. Corey Miller, the company’s corporate safety manager, will tell you the order of priorities never shifts: safety first, then quality, then productivity. Plenty of companies say something similar. Fewer mean it when production is on the line.
"Safety is our number one core value. A lot of companies like to say that, but then whenever production goes down, they want to throw safety to the wayside and focus on production. That is not who we are."
Corey Miller // Corporate Safety Manager, Scope Services
The old platform stopped keeping up
Scope Services ran one of the long-established telematics platforms for years, and early on it did the job well. Then the updates slowed down. New technology showed up everywhere else in the industry, especially around AI, and the platform Scope was paying for stayed roughly where it had always been.
The team wanted more than dots on a map. Knowing where a truck sat did nothing to tell them what was happening behind the wheel, which is where the real risk lives. They wanted to see unsafe habits before those habits turned into incidents, coach drivers with actual context instead of guesswork, and back their people up when something went wrong on the road.
So, Scope Services went shopping. The team demo’ed several platforms and ran pilots before committing to anything, and the pilot is what settled it. IntelliShift stood out against the alternatives on two counts: the platform itself, and the people who came with it. Miller describes the team Scope Services worked with as absolutely wonderful, and Woulfe, who handled most of the onboarding, says she cannot say enough good things about them. Scope Services kept the cameras from day one.
The first few weeks were not comfortable
Nobody at Scope Services pretends the rollout was frictionless. These drivers had been tracked for years, but they had never been recorded, and that is a very different ask. You spend years working in the field your own way, then a device shows up, records you, and suggests you are not as safe as you believed. A lot of them did not like it at first.
Acceptance came faster than Scope expected, though, and it came for a specific reason. Drivers figured out who the cameras were actually protecting.
The moment it clicked
A customer began berating a Scope Services employee on site, and the confrontation escalated far enough that the police were called. The employee had the presence of mind to walk back to the vehicle so the whole thing would be recorded. Scope used that footage to support its employee. That is not a driver tolerating a camera. That is a driver who understands the camera is on their side.
“A lot of drivers now actually like it, because they see the benefit of it.”
Corey Miller // Corporate Safety Manager, Scope Services
From the 400s to 877
Two months in, the numbers tell the story. Scope Services watched its company-wide driver safety score climb from an average that sat under 500 to 877, an increase of more than 75% (above the IntelliShift recommended minimum). Preventable vehicle incidents dropped, for the simple reason that drivers are paying more attention than they used to.
Distracted driving is the behavior Scope Services catches most, and the in-cab alerts do much of that work. A driver glances down at a phone, or misses a speed limit change, and the alert speaks up in the moment instead of showing up in a report three days later.
“Everything out there is made to distract us. We get so complacent in our driving behaviors that we do not realize what we are doing may be unsafe. It is nice to have that ding saying, hey, distracted driving.”
Corey Miller // Corporate Safety Manager, Scope Services
Drivers react to those alerts one of two ways. Some argue, insisting they were not on their phone, until the video says otherwise. More of them watch the clip, recognize themselves, put the phone down, and leave it down for the rest of the day. Either way, the argument ends, because the footage answers the question.
That changed the coaching conversation entirely for the people running it. Office manager Diana Owsley can now sit down with a driver and walk through exactly what happened rather than describing a data point and hoping it lands. She calls the footage very, very useful, and it is easy to see why. Nobody debates a video
Scope Services is still working with the drivers who need more help, and doing it deliberately. Rather than drawing a hard line right away, the team built in a ramp-up period so people have room to adjust to a new system. The goal is getting everyone up to the company standard, not catching them out.
Paying for itself already
The financial case moved just as quickly. Scope Services received a significant insurance rebate covering its camera-equipped vehicles, and it started recouping the investment almost immediately. For a safety program, that’s rare. Most of them take years to show up on a balance sheet.
Paying for itself already
Two months into full deployment, Scope Services is just getting started. The team is still uncovering features they haven’t put to work yet, and the results so far come from only a fraction of what the platform can do. If this is what two months looks like, six months should look even better.
Ask the Scope Services team whether the dash cams justify the investment, and the answer comes back short. Most definitely.
