Double Nickel's AI Agent Vera Completes 40% of Driver Verifications Solo

Double Nickel's new AI agent completed 40% of driver employment verifications fully autonomously in beta testing, and cut average turnaround from four days to one, the New York-based company announced Thursday, Oct. 22.

The agent, called Vera, ran a 30-day beta with two trucking carriers operating a combined fleet of more than 500 trucks. During that period Vera attempted roughly 250 verifications and autonomously completed more than 100, according to Double Nickel.

The speed gap is stark. Verifications handled by Vera averaged one day, against four days for manual checks processed through Double Nickel's applicant tracking system. Pricing is usage-based: $7 per verified employment experience, with customers charged only when a verification is actually completed.

How does Vera work?

The agent operates inside Double Nickel's applicant tracking system and automates the grunt work of employment verification. It:

• Identifies contacts at a driver's previous employers
• Sends verification requests and follows up by phone and email
• Records and transcribes calls, and logs every attempt
• Calls former employers to obtain missing contact information and saves those details for future requests

Vera identifies itself as a virtual assistant on calls and tells recipients the line is recorded. Double Nickel said consent to recording is collected during the application process through its ATS.

When Vera cannot close out a verification on its own, it helps carriers document their contact attempts. That matters because failure cases are real: a former employer may have closed, may not respond, or may use a third-party platform the agent does not yet support. In those instances carriers may still need to handle the check themselves or document their good-faith effort. Double Nickel said it is working to add support for additional platforms.

Vera is now available to all Double Nickel customers.

What are the federal rules behind this?

The product targets a compliance process rooted in federal regulation. Motor carriers must investigate the safety performance histories of prospective drivers who worked for other DOT-regulated employers during the previous three years.

Under 49 CFR 391.23, carriers must investigate a driver's employment history and safety performance, including relevant crash records and certain drug and alcohol violations. They generally must obtain the required information — or document good-faith efforts to get it — within 30 days of the driver's first day of service. The records go into the driver's qualification file.

The federal Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, live since January 2020, centralized drug and alcohol violation records for CDL holders. Since January 2023, employers have been required to query the Clearinghouse as part of pre-employment checks instead of relying on previous employers for that data. Even so, carriers must still investigate the remaining elements of a driver's employment and safety history, including applicable crash records and safety performance information.

"Fleets we talk to consistently tell us that employment verifications remain one of the most manual, time-consuming parts of the driver hiring process," Francisco López Roualdes, CEO and co-founder of Double Nickel, said.

Why does this matter for carriers?

The compliance burden is real on the recordkeeping side too. The FMCSA requires motor carriers to retain safety performance history records for the duration of a driver's employment plus three years afterward — and carriers remain responsible for meeting federal investigation and recordkeeping requirements even when they use outside services.

For recruiting and safety teams, verifications are a choke point: staff must locate the right contact at a former employer, send requests and chase delayed responses, all while a hire waits. Automating that workflow could trim administrative workloads and move drivers through recruiting faster, which matters in a market where every seat filled quickly is capacity gained.

The 40% autonomous completion rate cuts both ways. It shows the technology can shoulder a meaningful share of the workload today. It also shows human involvement remains necessary for most checks, and carriers using Vera will still need staff ready to step in when the agent hits a wall.

The trajectory, though, favors automation: Double Nickel is expanding platform support, and each integration pushes the completion rate — and the one-day turnaround — further into territory that manual processing cannot match.