Telematics and positioning market giant Trimble outlined a new partnership with original equipment manufacturer John Deere, doubled down on its partnership with Caterpillar and announced a natural language artificial intelligence-based tool in its Trimble Connect project management platform at the Trimble Dimensions conference held in Las Vegas, Nov. 11 to 13.
On Oct. 22, John Deere announced it was parterning with Trimble to integrate the construction tech giant's Earthworks grade control technology into Deere's SmartGrade platform. This will offer Deere's customers access to the Trimble technology ecosystem, includes its advanced positioning systems as well as telematics and grade control features.
Ron Bisio, Trimble's senior vice president of field systems, said Deere customers will receive access to Trimble's GNSS receivers and radio frequencies as well through their SmartGrade software. No date was announced for when the integration will be implemented, but Deere and Trimble executives both said Earthworks tools would be available to customers on Deere machines sometime in 2025.
Trimble touted several of its AI products and told the 7,000-plus users in attendance that it remains committed to developing AI-based tools that will improve workflows, whether they're used by operators in the field or architects in their offices working in SketchUp.
Trimble ran a demonstration of SketchUp Diffusion, a generative AI-powered tool that was shown as part of the event's SketchUp Labs Program. Based on the Stable Diffusion AI platform, it allows architects to generate images based on user input, and iterate their design intent based on text prompts and preset visual styles.
"What we are exploring now is multi-query AI, providing autonomy for the AI agent to make decisions," says Aviad Almagor, vice president of technology and innovation at Trimble. "For this, you need to provide the AI the ability to reflect on its work, to iterate, and you need to provide it access to APIs, to historical data sets and to other types of data, or even coding environments," he told ENR at the conference.
Mark Schwartz, Trimble vice president of AECO, said Trimble is trying to create an ecosystem for its construction and design data where that data can flow where it's needed in a non-fragmented way.
"We have hardware, software and data all trying to work together in the best way possible," Schwartz said.
To that end, Trimble CEO Rob Painter introduced a new AI feature for the Trimble Connect platform that can work off of natural language queries and is able to return results in a list form. The generative AI companion is still in beta, but Trimble executives said it would be made publicly available next year.
Trimble and Caterpillar opted to extend their 22-year-long Caterpillar Trimble Control Technologies joint venture Oct. 2. The new agreement includes expanded distribution of grade control solutions throughout the Cat product fleet.
Caterpillar customers can access Trimble technology via factory-fit grade options and expanded aftermarket and digital offerings directly from Cat dealers.
Trimble customers have, via the joint venture, continued mixed-fleet support from SITECH dealers and access to grade control through the Trimble Construction One platform.
Other announcements made by Trimble at the user conference included a beta test for field crews using SiteWorks to automatically receive information from Trimble's B2W management platform which connects the field and office. Painter said all major ERP systems can now be connected to B2W in a "low code" way via Trimble's AppExchange.