At the 2026 IBTTA Technology Summit in Orlando tolling executives, OEM representatives, and state transportation officials gathered to examine one of the most pressing questions facing the industry: how do you modernize infrastructure that millions of people depend on every day, without losing the reliability they expect? The conversations that followed were candid, grounded in operational experience, and pointed toward a future closer than many in the room anticipated.
Across sessions, several consistent themes emerged that align with what North Highland's transportation team is seeing with clients nationwide.
People Drive Adoption, Not Technology
The most important finding of the summit came not from a product demonstration but from a controlled study. North Highland's Kelsea Gustavson joined Jamie Creason of the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission to discuss research that tested whether a structured change management framework could meaningfully improve AI adoption within a public sector organization. Two departments received access to the same enterprise AI tool. One also received leadership communications, peer champions, hands-on role-specific training, and consistent management support. The results for the group provided the change management tools showed a 78% increase in usage while the group without any tools showed no measurable change.
North Highland has observed this pattern repeatedly across transportation and public sector engagements. The organizations that succeed with AI transformation are not necessarily those with the best technology portfolios. They are the ones that invest in their people with the same discipline they bring to their systems, because technology only delivers results when people using it are ready, supported, and confident. The organizations seeing real returns are not necessarily the ones spending the most or moving the fastest. They are the ones building deliberately, with operating model, culture, leadership, and workforce developed together. Read our latest point of view on what it takes to build an organization that AI can actually work inside.
Data Strategy Is the Prerequisite for Everything
Every session at the summit, regardless of topic, returned to the same foundation: the quality of your data determines the quality of every decision, tool, and system built on top of it. Florida's Turnpike Enterprise demonstrated this when AI-assisted redesign of their statewide travel demand model reduced scenario run time from 36 minutes to approximately one minute and cut development time by 90%. The breakthrough was possible because the underlying data architecture was sound.
The Illinois Tollway's contact center transformation began not with a technology deployment but with an analysis of call recordings to understand why customers were actually calling. That data-first approach revealed that more than 80% of call volume related to services already available through self-service channels, and it shaped a strategy that reduced average wait times from more than eight minutes to less than 20 seconds within a year.
For transportation leaders investing in AI and analytics, the message from Orlando was consistent: data strategy and implementation is not a prerequisite you check off before the real work begins. It is where the real work begins.
Connected Vehicles Are a Decision That Needs to Be Made Now
The connected vehicle session reframed a conversation many agencies have treated as forward-looking into one that demands near-term action. OEMs including Audi and Stellantis are formalizing relationships with tolling bodies today, with live connected vehicle tolling already deployed across multiple vehicle brands with real customers actively using it. Audi announced a formal partnership MOU with IBTTA at the summit itself.
The path forward is hybrid. RFID transponders, license plate recognition, and connected vehicle records will coexist for years, with V2X technology beginning as an augmentation before gradually becoming the preferred channel. Agencies best positioned for that transition are those piloting now, investing in modular infrastructure, and building OEM relationships before foundational governance decisions are made without them. The average U.S. vehicle stays on the road for 14 years. The decisions made in the next few years will shape the tolling ecosystem for the next two decades.
Governance and Modularity Are Strategic Assets
Several speakers offered a caution worth carrying back from Orlando. AI vendors are moving from subsidized introductory pricing toward usage-based cost models, and today's market concentration in AI mirrors patterns from the peak of the dot-com era. Organizations locked into a single vendor's proprietary stack are carrying risk they may not fully recognize.
The practical response is modular architecture. ViaPlus demonstrated a payment middleware layer that allowed one client to migrate 20% of all transactions to a new payment channel in less than three months and another to absorb a primary gateway failure without interruption. Florida's FDOT formalized a comprehensive AI governance policy in 2025 that became a reference point across multiple sessions. The Illinois Tollway spent months stress-testing its AI governance boundaries before going live with new tools. These are not compliance exercises. They are the organizational capabilities that determine whether technology investments remain durable as the landscape shifts.
Collaboration as Operational Strategy
Three Florida toll authority executives offered a clear example of what operational collaboration looks like at scale. The Central Florida Expressway Authority, Florida's Turnpike Enterprise, and the Tampa-Hillsborough Expressway Authority serve overlapping customers across a network of interconnected corridors. Over time, they built a working model through consistent cross-agency communication, coordinated technology deployments, and a deliberate decision to serve their customers as a region rather than as separate agencies.
That same theme surfaced in the cybersecurity conversation, where Maine Turnpike's executive argued that the industry's culture of suppressing breach disclosure makes every agency less secure, and in the interoperability discussion, where a clear warning emerged: without a nationally recognized customer-facing identifier, third-party mobility platforms will define that consumer experience before the tolling industry has the chance to.
The road ahead for tolling is more complex, more interconnected, and more significant than any single technology can address. What the summit made clear is that the agencies navigating it most effectively share a common approach: they invest in their people, build on sound data, plan for modularity, and treat collaboration as a core operational strategy.
At North Highland, we believe that turning vision into value in transportation requires both sides of the equation: the technology to modernize operations and the people strategy to make it stick. Our transportation experts work alongside agency leaders to build workforce readiness, drive stronger adoption, and advance next-generation revenue assurance across tolling operations. If you are exploring what these shifts mean for your organization, let’s talk.
