Nabil Tabet

Ask Nabil Tabet about vehicle tracking and he will tell you, perhaps surprisingly for a man whose company installs the hardware, that it is not the hard part. “Tracking is pretty easy,” he says. “There’s a ton of tools available on the market to only track a location.” What interests the president of IoTab is everything a location cannot show on its own: a client’s whole workflow, and the places in it “where the time is being lost, where the problems happen.”

IoTab helps companies keep track of their vehicles and assets, whether trucks, trailers, equipment, tools or heavy machinery. It supplies GPS tracking, dashcams and tablets and installs the hardware on the assets themselves. But Tabet is clear that the equipment is not the most important part of the job. That is helping clients choose the right solution, get it set up, integrate it and train their teams to use it every day. “In simple terms, we make technology easier and more useful for their teams.”

Dashcams show what he means. Mounted on the windscreen, a camera can film the road, the driver or another angle, and in doing so gives a business, in Tabet’s phrase, “a witness available every time in their operations.” If there is an accident, the recording can show that the driver was not at fault. If a client disputes whether a job was done, the footage can serve as proof. And the same material can be used for training.

The idea for IoTab came from years on the other side of the table. Tabet has spent most of his adult life in B2B sales. “I’ve seen a lot of tools on the market, very powerful tools,” he says. He also met businesses with plenty of problems to solve and workflows to improve. “And I’ve seen a huge gap between those two worlds.” Many companies had vehicles and valuable assets out in the field but very little visibility into where they were or how they were being used, and adopting new technology felt complicated, especially for businesses without a dedicated technical team. So he set out to be the middleman between those two worlds: doing the consulting work to match a client with the right tool, then staying for the work that follows a decision, which clients often lack the time or know-how to do themselves. “I saw an opportunity to help them take that first step. That’s how IoTab began.”

His approach to decisions is just as practical. Most business owners, Tabet observes, decide by intuition, and he thinks that is the best way to make decisions. But he does not treat intuition as a mystery. “To me, intuition doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes from the information we’ve gathered and the experiences we’ve had.” That is why, faced with the same situation, a doctor’s intuition would be more powerful than his, and why someone with years in a field may have a very different instinct from someone just starting out. The answer is to feed intuition with data, experience and information so that it becomes more powerful. “We mix those two worlds together,” he says, and he applies the same rule to himself: “I listen to my intuition, but I also check the facts before making a decision.”

On AI, Tabet sets aside the version in the news and in the movies. The most practical advance he has seen is in how much faster software can now be built. A programming project that might once have lasted a few months, or even a few years, can now be done in a very short time, and that changes what IoTab can offer.

Many small and medium-sized companies grew without much technology or structure, and, as he puts it, “if you’re not well structured, you’re going to pay the price sooner or later.” Large, complicated software rarely fitted them, because every business has its exceptions. “Everybody has a way of doing things.” Today, IoTab can build a custom application around the way a company actually works and automate parts of its operations. “That’s what excites me: we can adapt the technology to the business, even when the business has a complex structure.” He feels that not many people in his industry see it that way yet, but thinks that sooner or later everyone will be on the same page.

All of it comes back, for Tabet, to value. Return on investment is, by his own account, one of his biggest passions, and he measures it in plain terms: time saved, costs reduced, people able to do their jobs better. What makes him proudest is being known as a company that helps businesses integrate technology and improve their capability, especially in the Quebec region, where he sees many established companies with a lot of work still to do.

To be seen as the company that helps them reach the next level would mean a great deal to him: “I think that would be the best gift that I could have as a recognition.” He is equally clear about the reputation he wants IoTab to carry into the future: “That’s what I want IoTab to be known for: understanding how a company works and finding technology that makes a real difference in its day-to-day operations.”