May Mobility, an autonomous vehicle (AV) technology company, has announced a strategic partnership with Itochu Corporation, a provider of customer experience and business process outsourcing solutions, to help accelerate driverless deployments globally over the coming years. Beginning with a collaboration with Itochu’s Bellsystem24, May Mobility aims to quickly deploy thousands of driverless vehicles and support millions of riders with tele-assist and rider support platforms.
The partners plan to leverage Bellsystem24’s expertise in workflow optimizations to increase the efficiency of May Mobility’s tele-assist process at an industry-leading cost. As May Mobility launches additional driverless operations, its tele-assist platform will continue to rely on the multi-policy decision-making (MPDM) driving technology’s reasoning models with minimal human intervention. May Mobility’s tele-assist platform also enables a remote monitor to easily guide and assist multiple vehicles, to enhance safe operations at scale.
“When building a safe autonomy system, it makes no sense to replace the driver behind the wheel with another driver behind the curtain. We created a better way,” said Edwin Olson, CEO and founder of May Mobility. “Partnering with Itochu, we will take a highly efficient, safety-first approach as we ramp up the deployment of our driverless operations.”
Bellsystem24 has more than 40 years of customer support experience and a proprietary operations management system with AI issue identification and resolution capabilities. The proposed collaboration will build on May’s technical capabilities and provide additional levels of support and redundancy for customers and partners.
“We are very excited to expand the business by combining May’s advanced technical capabilities with our group solutions,” said Masato Horiuchi, COO of the ICT division at Itochu. “In addition to supporting driverless operations with Bellsystem24, we will promote this business collaboration by leveraging the comprehensive group strengths unique to a Japanese sogo shosha in areas such as geographical data and building IT infrastructure.”
In related news, Uber Technologies, a global ride-hail company, and May Mobility recently announced a multi-year strategic partnership to scale the availability of AV transportation. Click here to read the full story