How an expedition vehicle company is fueling its workshop with AI to launch more customer adventures

I grew up working summers at my dad's shipyard in Sausalito, California, where I got a pretty broad education in marine construction. Funny enough, I originally had a different career path in mind and planned on becoming an orthopedic surgeon, but after landing in three different hospitals while recovering from a ski accident, I realized the hospital environment wasn't for me.

I eventually gravitated back to what I knew and loved: building things. I started working at the shipyard again, and that's when the idea for TruckHouse really began to take shape. I bought a super rare 1987 Toyota Sunrader 4x4 and spent about 2,000 hours completely rebuilding it. My friend approached me, saying he wanted one, too, but I told him I'd only build new ones. A year later, he called back and offered to write me a business plan for his business school class in exchange for work on his van. We ended up winning a business plan competition and securing a grant, which became the tipping point for launching TruckHouse.

At TruckHouse, we build state-of-the-art carbon fiber expedition vehicles—glorified 4x4 RVs or campers that leverage marine and aerospace technology for superior construction and quality, enabling you to go further and camp in comfort no matter the weather. Our vehicles are designed for world travel, offering features like heated floors, AC, a cooktop, and more, all within a compact footprint that balances off-road capability with livability. We aim to create an heirloom product that lasts the life of the truck.

We're a small, egoless team of around 15 people, and we do everything in-house. Every day is a school day; we believe in continuous learning and improving the quality of everything we do, always pushing each other to find better ways of doing things. We started playing around with generative AI when it first gained popularity, and as the experiences have refined, our use of Gemini has grown exponentially.

I'm constantly using Gemini in my daily business life to reformat documents, summarize data from financial spreadsheets, and help with emails. It gets you 90% of the way to the finish line so much faster. For instance, we have a bill of materials with over a thousand items. Instead of endlessly scrolling through a spreadsheet, I can just ask Gemini about our inventory, and it instantly provides the answer.

I do a lot of driving for expos and listen to audiobooks, primarily business-oriented ones. I’ll use speech-to-text to take simple notes and later feed them into Gemini, which expands on them, organizes them, and provides a three-page synopsis in about three seconds.

What's truly amazing is how seamlessly Gemini has become integrated into our workflow.

The ultimate goal of TruckHouse is to get outside and enjoy nature, and Google AI is helping us do just that. By saving time in the office and on the shop floor, we can build more trucks, create more experiences for our customers, and give our team a better work-life balance. The ability to make other people's dreams come true, seeing where our trucks go and the experiences they enable, truly fuels our fire and keeps us going.