Smart Connectivity Solutions

Ensures Action, Not Just Alerts, and Delivers a Step Change in Duty of Care for Remote Workforces

Wagga Wagga, 18 May 2026 – Zetifi, an Australian technology company providing connectivity between vehicles, workers, assets and the systems fleet and safety teams use, has launched Zetifi Marshal, a Microsoft-native connected fleet technology solution for lone worker safety.  

Zetifi Marshal was developed with insights from Telstra about the needs of enterprise customers, including Telstra’s own field services fleet, for Microsoft-native workflows around lone worker duress alerts and automated check-ins. The API-first solution connects via cellular or Wi-Fi, integrates Icom UHF radios, and feeds lone worker duress, check-ins, and incidents from any source into the customer’s own Microsoft 365 tenant. The solution is now being deployed to beta customers around the country, including with integrations to Geotab telematics.

Peter Braneley, General Manager, Big Springs Water, says,

“We chose Geotab and Zetifi together because they fit the way we operate. Zetifi’s integration with Geotab means our safety alerts flow straight into the Microsoft tools our team already uses, and we can tailor what we see to suit our needs. That alignment is what made it the right choice.”

According to Safe Work Australia, 42 per cent of workplace fatalities involve vehicle incidents. Across distributed workforces, including those employed as field technicians or working in the utilities, transport, agriculture, emergency services sectors, safety risk is constant, and largely managed by tools that detect events but don’t ensure action. 

From fleet data to automated action

Telematics, cameras and lone worker apps generate constant streams of safety data, but that data lives in vendor portals, separated from the Microsoft systems the rest of the business runs on. Action still depends on someone watching a separate dashboard or basic email alerts and the value of the data too often stops at the vendor’s UI.

Zetifi Marshal extends the value of fleet and worker data into the customer’s own Microsoft 365 tenant, where it can be used to drive automated and agentic workflows. Duress, check-ins, location and incident events flow into Teams cards, SharePoint records and Power Automate escalations, alongside the compliance, ops and safety processes already running there. The customer owns the data and the workflow, and safety events connect directly to the systems where action actually happens.

Zetifi Marshal accepts inputs from any source. These include Zetifi’s Smart Antenna Pro gateway, and Icom UHF radios via Zetifi’s global integration partnership with Icom. The solution also works with third-party platforms and devices, including Geotab telematics. The same policy and workflow apply regardless of where the event came from. An acknowledgement loop confirms each event was actioned in workflow, not just delivered.

Manual triage collapses to seconds. Where workflows fail to respond, backup communications fire automatically.

Dan Winson, CEO and Founder, Zetifi, says,

“With Zetifi Marshal, no safety event is silently dropped. Organisations can take their compliance and duty-of-care to a new level.  Marshal produces a continuous evidence trail (event, policy, action, acknowledgement, outcome) which means no manual chasing and being audit-ready for records from day one.”

Key features include: 

Capture. Events come from the Smart Antenna Pro gateway, Icom UHF radios, telematics devices including Geotab GO9 and GO Focus Plus dash cameras, or partner APIs. All normalise into one event model.

Communicate. The Smart Antenna Pro is a multi-protocol edge gateway. It connects via Telstra Cat-M1 cellular or Starlink terminal Wi-Fi, with BLE for short-range, plus an integration to Icom UHF radios through Zetifi's global technology partnership. Critical events fire to Zetifi and the customer's Power Automate webhook in parallel, running two independent network paths.

Cloud. Zetifi's AWS IoT ingest normalises events, supervises delivery, and runs an

acknowledgement loop with Microsoft. The customer's Power Automate flow must POST back to Zetifi. If acknowledgement is missing, backup comms fire to the customer's catch-all contacts (SMS via Telstra Messaging API, email via Amazon SES). Delivery and acknowledgement are tracked.

Workflow.  Action and evidence happen in the customer's Microsoft tenant: Teams cards, SharePoint records and Power Automate escalations, with Power BI dashboards and Copilot agents that read the customer's own policy arriving at commercial release. The Marshal Console, Zetifi's operational map and worker status view, is built on the customer's SharePoint. The customer owns everything downstream of the API: their data, workflows and policies.

“This collaboration demonstrates a new category of connected safety platform, integrating hardware, connectivity and workflows into a single operational system,”

says Ben Green, Head of muru-D & Incubation, Product & Development Technology, Telstra.

“It reflects the kind of applied innovation that can reshape how organisations approach worker safety at scale.”

Channa Seneviratne, Technology Development and Innovation Executive, Telstra, added,

“This joint work between Telstra and Zetifi establishes a new model of worker safety, where connectivity, AI and enterprise flows operate as one system. It moves beyond monitoring to reliable execution, which is a step change in how safety is delivered in the field. “

Zetifi will showcase the Zetifi Marshal Lone Worker Safety solutions at the Workplace Health & Safety Show in Melbourne on 20-21 May at booth number K18.

Distributed workforce organisations interested in joining the Marshal beta programme can contact Zetifi at hello@zetifi.com. 

About Zetifi

Zetifi is an Australian wireless technology company designing award-winning Smart Antennas and connected fleet safety solutions. Combining advanced antenna engineering, onboard electronics and cloud integration, Zetifi connects vehicle, radio and field safety signals to agentic workflows, alerts and evidence for connected fleet safety and lone worker safety.  For further information, please visit https://www.zetifi.com/ or https://www.zetifi.com/connected-fleet-safety

This article was originally published on Fleet HV News and is republished here with permission.

‍Source: Eyes in the cab: balancing safety and surveillance

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In-cabin cameras are one of the best safety tools available to fleet operators, but deployment can be fraught. Zetifi CEO Dan Winson on the decisions that determine how well or badly a roll-out lands.

Deploying fleet cameras isn’t a guarantee they’ll be used. In many cases they’re not. The hardware may be installed and the platform configured but six months later the Fleet Manager is the only person who logs in. Incidents are still reviewed after the fact, rather than prevented, the workforce is quietly resentful, and the safety scores look much the same as they ever did.

In many such instances, the technology isn’t the problem. What separates the programs that change outcomes, from those that don’t, is a set of decisions made upfront.

Why deploy cameras at all?

The safety case for cameras has strengthened considerably as the technology has improved. AI-powered systems can detect phone use, fatigue, smoking, and seat belt non-compliance in real time and alert the driver in the cab when something needs attention. Footage stored in the cloud can be made available immediately when an incident needs reviewing. Fleet operators using this technology report meaningful drops in at-fault incident rates, faster resolution of disputed claims, and lower insurance premiums over time. That’s the kind of compliance evidence regulators and large enterprise customers increasingly expect to see. Then there’s the driver-protection angle. The same footage that monitors behaviour is the footage that clears a driver when someone else causes an incident.

Decision one: Dashcam or connected solution?

A basic dashcam records footage that can be useful after an incident, but it can’t help prevent one from occurring. A connected solution that integrates with your telematics platform, generates event-based alerts, supports driver coaching workflows, and feeds data into your operational reporting does. If your goal is protection from contested liability claims, a dashcam may be sufficient. If it’s reducing incidents over time, the connected layer is what does that work.

Decision two: Outward-facing, inward-facing, or both?

Outward-facing cameras capture what happens on the road. They tend to be an easier sell to workers and unions because they’re clearly oriented toward external protection. Inward-facing cameras that monitor driver behaviour are more prone to privacy pushback. Long-haul fleets where fatigue is a known risk have a good case for the latter while urban fleets doing short runs may find outward-facing cameras suffice. A staggered approach works in some settings: outward-facing first, with inward-facing introduced once trust is established. Workplace surveillance legislation also varies and legal advice is essential.

Decision three: Do you need AI event detection?

AI event detection is what turns a recording system into a safety program. It enables real time, in-cab coaching, automatic event flagging, driver safety scores, and the kind of targeted alerting that scales beyond what a manager can review manually. If you want to identify your highest-risk drivers before they have an incident, run a coaching program that’s responsive to individual behaviour, or generate the compliance records that insurers increasingly expect, AI is what makes that possible. If your use case is purely evidentiary you can get there without it, but you’re leaving most of the value on the table.

Decision four: How aggressive should the alerting be?

This is the decision that separates programs that work from programs that drift. Systems configured too aggressively flood drivers with in-cab notifications and managers with event alerts. After a while, both groups stop responding to what they perceive as excessive noise. Getting the thresholds right during your pilot phase will result in a genuine safety uplift, not an irritant to be tuned out.

Decision five: Where should the alerts go?

Camera platforms route alerts within their own portal by default, which means the fleet manager sees them and the rest of the organisation mostly doesn’t. That’s a problem because fleet safety isn’t only a fleet management activity. WHS, HR, and operations managers all have legitimate reasons to see safety data, but having to log into a fleet portal can be an impediment. When alerts are only visible to fleet teams, the follow-up actions they should trigger, such as coaching, retraining, and pattern-based escalation, often don’t happen.

Microsoft 365 is foundation technology for most organisations. That makes  it the optimum environment for safety alerts to land. Rather than an alert sitting in a generic inbox, a critical event from the camera system can route to the right supervisor in Teams the moment it triggers, with the responder named and the workflow defined. A pattern of harsh-braking events from one driver can trigger an automated coaching task. Driver safety scores can sit in Power BI alongside other operational data for regular leadership review, rather than being presented in a standalone monthly report. The camera vendor’s portal isn’t where the safety program runs; it’s where the data is generated. The program runs in the workflows that follow.

The conversation that has to happen

These technical decisions matter. So does the way the human aspects of a camera roll-out are managed. Telling drivers they’re going to be monitored continuously is rarely a popular announcement, and the resistance, when it comes, is often a reasonable response to a change that hasn’t been properly explained. Workers who don’t understand why cameras are being installed and what will happen to the footage will inevitably reach for the worst-case interpretation. Engaging with the workforce early can help avert industrial unrest and improve the likelihood of successful uptake. The footage that monitors a driver is the same footage that protects them, and most drivers recognise that when it’s explained clearly. For organisations committed to fleet safety, it’s one of the most important conversations you can have.

This article was originally published on SMBTech and is republished here with permission.

‍Source: Your Drivers Aren’t Wrong To Be Suspicious Of Fleet Cameras

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It’s easy to attribute the resistance to misunderstandings and poor messaging. Both can be factors. But often the workers asking hard questions are doing exactly what you’d want them to do. That is, noticing that the rules are changing and asking why.

Telematics Already Crossed Lines

Most fleets were collecting large amounts of data well before cameras arrived. Location, fuel consumption, harsh acceleration, braking and cornering, time on site and idle time were logged, scored and reviewed by managers, often without drivers knowing which events were being flagged or what was being done about them.

The data is, of course, genuinely valuable. Harsh ABCs are leading indicators of crash risk, fuel discrepancy monitoring catches both honest mistakes and occasional fraud and location data is essential for scheduling, dispatch and incident response. The fleets that handle telematics well are those that educate their drivers from the outset. That includes explaining what will be collected, what will trigger a coaching conversation and what will simply be stored. This makes the system feel like a tool rather than a trap.

The fleets that don’t get this right tend to find out, over time, that drivers have stopped trusting the platform and started working around it.

Cameras Raise The Stakes

Telematics watch the vehicle but cameras watch the person. That’s a line a lot of drivers aren’t comfortable having crossed unless there’s a clear conversation about why it’s happening.

The conversation that works isn’t complicated. The same footage that records a driver behaving badly is the footage that clears them when someone else causes an accident. In industries where road incidents generate contested claims, that protection can mean the difference between a driver wearing costs unjustly and walking away with their record intact. Most drivers understand that argument when it’s put to them honestly. Unfortunately, all too many don’t have it discussed at all, prior to the cameras appearing in their cabs.

Configuration choices matter just as much as the conversation. Outward-facing cameras may be sufficient if liability protection is the main goal, while inward-facing monitoring is harder to justify unless fatigue or distraction are known risks. Event-triggered recording is more defensible than continuous recording in most contexts and drivers with strong safety records can reasonably be excluded from the more intensive settings. These choices are easier to discuss with workers when they’re presented as decisions the business has made deliberately, rather than as default system settings.

Workplace surveillance legislation also varies by jurisdiction and the specifics around notice, consent and data handling are detailed enough to necessitate legal advice during the planning stage.

Another common pitfall is alert fatigue. If aggressively configured systems flood drivers with in-cab notifications and their managers with event alerts, both groups will eventually stop responding to either. Running a pilot, with thresholds tuned to proposed alert volumes rather than vendor presets, can put paid to this problem.

Where The Data Ends Up Matters Too

Telematics and camera platforms are the right environment for the fleet team, but they aren’t the right environment for everyone else who has a legitimate interest in the data. This cohort may include WHS Managers, Operations Leads, HR and Supervisors.

When safety data is stored in a fleet portal that most of the organisation does not access, the workflows the data should trigger tend to falter. Coaching follow-ups slip, policy acknowledgements are hidden away in spreadsheets and drivers with declining scores don’t receive the timely refresher training they need.

Routing fleet data into the tools the rest of the business already uses, for example, alerts going through Microsoft Teams, acknowledgements tracked in SharePoint and trends sitting in Power BI alongside other operational data, is what makes the difference between a monitoring system and a working safety programme. Bottom line: The technology is only as useful as the workflows built around it.
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Paul Maybon is Chief Product Officer at Zetifi