Logan Bus Company is set to roll out an artificial intelligence-powered phone system designed to give New York City families faster answers about their children's school bus transportation while reducing the volume of routine calls handled by customer service staff.

Built on Cisco technology, the system links a student's bus route to a parent's caller ID and can provide information about a bus's location and delays. Parents can also choose to speak with a live customer service representative.

The launch follows a summer pilot that gave Logan Bus an early look at how the technology could change its call center operations.

“For the summer pilot, we have quantifiable data showing the average call time was significantly down from years past, and that the AI agents handled roughly 60% of all calls. Most importantly, the number of abandoned or dropped calls was essentially nonexistent,” Corey Muirhead, executive vice president at Logan Bus Company, told School Bus Fleet.

Logan Bus transports approximately 30,000 special education and general education students on 2,000 routes daily and is the largest privately owned school bus provider serving the New York City Department of Education, according to the company. The system is meant to answer common parent questions, including where a bus is, why it is delayed, and when it is expected to arrive.

Where AI Stops and Employees Take Over

The system isn't intended to replace a live employee in every situation. If a child misses the bus and needs to be picked up, the AI assistant cannot handle the request, Muirhead said. Accidents and emergencies are also routed to a live agent.

When the AI lacks enough information to answer a parent's question, it is designed not to generate an answer.

“It will say it does not have the information and transfer to a live agent,” Muirhead said.

For escalated calls, Logan Bus says employees receive information about the student and the reason for the call before answering.

“The goal is to modernize the operation and make time more efficient,” Muirhead said. “Now the live agents have more information than ever before at their fingertips. The student ID, route number, bus number, and reason for calling are now all seen on the screen. This provides a level of insight efficiency never experienced before.”

Although AI agents now handle traditional “where’s my bus” calls, when issues do escalate, customer service representatives already know the problem before they pick up and can “remediate it immediately.”

How Parent and Student Information Is Protected

The use of caller ID and student transportation information also raises questions about how the system verifies that a caller is authorized to access a child's information. According to Muirhead, Logan Bus and NYC Public Schools have a data privacy agreement, and Logan Bus securely uploads the information to the Cisco system.

The caller's phone number must match the number a parent has registered with NYCPS. The caller must then provide the child's unique student ID number before proceeding.

“The safeguard in place is that no outsider can call the system and look up a child because the phone number must be linked to that child, and then a secondary safeguard is that the person must know their child’s unique Student ID number or they will not be able to proceed,” Muirhead said.

The phone system works alongside the NYC School Bus App, the citywide GPS tracking tool developed by the Department of Education in partnership with Via. Logan Bus said its drivers remain logged into the system so buses can be tracked in real time.

Currently, the phone system can also pull delay information that gives parents a reason for a reported delay.

Logan Bus plans to expand those capabilities. The company said the next phase is expected to establish a direct API connection to Via, giving the AI assistant real-time access to Via's GPS information rather than relying only on the bus delay system.

What It Takes To Bring AI Into School Transportation

For other school bus contractors or districts considering a similar system, Logan Bus cautions that implementation involves more than simply adding an AI assistant to an existing phone line.

“This was a large undertaking that took us many months with the LLM to complete,” Muirhead said. “We trained the agents with what questions would be asked. This was countless hours of interviews with staff to fine-tune the Agent.”

Connecting the AI system with other transportation technology remains part of the work.

“To truly maximize optimization, we need the API from an external third-party software provider that we are currently still in the works with,” Muirhead added.

Logan Bus plans to roll out the system in September. The company said the goal is to give families quicker access to routine transportation information while keeping live employees available for emergencies and more complex concerns.