Samsara Unveils AI-Powered Safety and Operational Intelligence Solutions at Annual Conference

Samsara enters 'the age of intelligence' - why its new hardware, network-powered safety features and AI operations matter

At Samsara's annual Beyond conference in San Diego this week, CEO Sanjit Biswas announced "the age of intelligence" for the vendor's customers - where the operational data flowing through its platform is going to be used at scale to introduce new AI-powered features and tools that utilize anonymized data from across the Samsara Network. The announcements mark an evolution for the company, which has spent the past decade building what it describes as the "Connected Operations Platform" for organizations that depend on physical operations. In short, Samsara has targeted industries where pen-and-paper processes and manual workflows have persisted - sectors that Biswas has previously noted "didn't have to squint" to see Return on Investment (ROI) from connected operations technology. Since its founding, Samsara has positioned itself as addressing a market that had been largely ignored by enterprise technology providers. Organizations managing fleets, construction sites, manufacturing facilities, and field services operations have historically been forced to cobble together multiple systems or rely on manual processes to manage their physical assets and workflows. Samsara's approach has been to provide an integrated platform that connects vehicles, equipment, and workers to digital systems, creating what the company calls "the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform for the physical world." The company has achieved significant scale in this approach, with its Connected Operations Cloud now processing 75 billion Application Programming Interface (API) calls and nine trillion data points. This data foundation - representing everything from vehicle telematics to AI-enabled dash cam footage across hundreds of thousands of connected assets - has become the basis for what Biswas now characterizes as an entirely new phase of the company's development. Today Samsara has unveiled more than a dozen new AI solutions at its annual user conference. Central to these developments is the company's new "Street Sense" capability, which harnesses the collective intelligence of millions of Samsara-connected vehicles to provide near real-time weather and road condition visibility across vast geographic areas. Speaking at the keynote this morning, Biswas says: We've entered the age of intelligence, and AI is helping our customers operate smarter. We're partnering with our customers to build products that help them run safer, more efficient operations and protect frontline workers while saving millions of dollars. The announcements are an expansion of Samsara's safety-first value proposition, introducing features that make use of the vendor's 14 trillion data points from connected operations worldwide. From AI-powered vehicle maintenance management to worker safety wearables, the product updates signal Samsara's ambition to become the definitive system of record for physical operations - with safety as the core use case. As we've noted previously, Samsara is one of the few Internet-of-Things vendors to actually find a use case (safety) that has translated into a sustainable customer base. Building on this, the company announced today its new AI Multi-Cam system, which provides 360-degree visibility around commercial vehicles while using Artificial Intelligence to identify pedestrians, cyclists, and other potential collision risks in real-time. The AI Multi-Cam includes four additional High Definition (HD) cameras that provide a complete view around the vehicle, all accessible through an in-cab monitor. The system actively notifies drivers in real-time of hazards such as pedestrians and cyclists, working with both Samsara cameras and third-party devices. Administrators can retrieve historic video footage and corresponding audio to help quickly resolve incidents. Johan Land, Samsara's Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering, demonstrated how the system can track pedestrians moving around a vehicle, with AI-generated alerts warning drivers of potential dangers. During a live demonstration showing a cyclist appearing in a truck's blind spot, he explains: The AI understood what was happening and alerted the driver. The company's approach to contextual AI represents a departure from simpler safety monitoring systems. Rather than simply flagging harsh braking events, the platform now analyzes the circumstances surrounding such incidents. During one demonstration, the AI correctly identified a driver's sharp braking as "defensive driving" to avoid a pedestrian, actually improving the driver's safety score rather than penalizing them. Land notes: This driver's safety score will go up, not down. Samsara has also introduced Safety Coaching for Lean Teams, which uses AI to analyze hundreds of risky driving events, considering factors like severity, frequency, road conditions, and total drive time. The system automatically sends low-risk behaviors to drivers for self-coaching and escalates higher-risk events to managers. The AI provides insight into behavioral trends across drivers and trips, allowing managers to coach based on driving patterns rather than isolated incidents. Samsara has also added a new Weather Intelligence feature, which provides a comprehensive approach to weather-related operational challenges. The system overlays real-time weather data from the National Weather Service onto existing dashboards, allowing administrators to view and alert workers of imminent threats such as fire risks and heavy rain. For the past few years Samsara has been building out its connected network, installing cameras and other internet-enabled devices across physical operations and fleets. This has enabled the vendor to now make use of the data coming from the network as a whole, rather than just focusing on companies at an individual level. For example, Samsara's new Street Sense tool uses anonymized imagery from millions of connected dash cameras to provide real-time visibility into weather conditions and road hazards. The system strips personally identifiable information from camera feeds while aggregating visual data to show what's happening across operational areas. Chief Product Officer Kiren Sekar says during his demonstration: We went from a radar view to Public Alerts to our cameras visibility to this collective Street Sense network. Now we know what's happening everywhere. During the keynote, Samsara showed near real-time images from across a flood watch zone in Texas, with timestamps showing updates from just seconds earlier. The system can compose messages for drivers based on weather alerts, with AI summarizing National Weather Service information into short messages that can be sent through push notifications or played as audio messages through dash camera speakers. On the hardware front, and building on the Asset Tag product launched last year, the vendor has today introduced Samsara Wearable - a connected device designed to protect frontline workers outside of vehicles. The device is capable of more than one year of battery life, achieved by using the Samsara network of devices rather than cellular connectivity (again showing how the network is proving central to the company's expanding features). The wearable includes one-click protection that connects workers to emergency services, providing precise location data and real-time audio recording of situations. The device also includes fall detection capabilities that can automatically detect and respond to falls in situations such as slips on icy sidewalks or falls from heights like scaffolding or cranes. Fleet managers can proactively check in on workers and alert them of unsafe conditions through push notifications to the device during severe weather or wildfire situations. Biswas explains: Instead of trying to send a signal back to the cellular network, which takes a lot of energy, we send a signal to the Samsara network. It's protecting you all and your frontline in their operations, wherever they are. Elsewhere, Samsara has also introduced end-to-end maintenance management capabilities directly within its platform. The system includes AI-enhanced Driver Vehicle Inspection Reports (DVIRs) that allow drivers to convert inspection notes from voice to text automatically. Managers can now ensure reports are properly completed by viewing drivers' walkaround paths, inspection duration, and quality of report photos (in an attempt to stop drivers trying to bypass the system). The platform triggers real-time alerts for missing DVIRs, monitors Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration data, reviews inspection results and violations, and audits driver behavior. Fault Code Intelligence automatically deciphers vehicle fault codes and uses AI to create maintenance work orders, while AI invoice scanning helps upload external vendor invoices into the platform. Level Monitoring provides near real-time visibility into levels across various tank types, with the aim of improving tank utilization and inventory optimization. The system's ability to look ahead and recommend bundling maintenance tasks demonstrates the kind of operational intelligence that becomes possible with Samsara's extensive data collection. Sekar notes: These fault codes, unless you're a really experienced mechanic, can be really hard to understand. This is another great application for AI. Samsara also announced its new Route Planning capability, which integrates with fleet operators' sales systems to identify the most efficient routes and delivery schedules. The system considers variables like vehicle limitations, compliance requirements for drivers, customer delivery windows, and traffic and weather patterns to stay within promised delivery windows and avoid unnecessary fuel usage. Early Samsara data suggests a 15 percent reduction in the number of vehicles required for deliveries - and is being positioned as 'enterprise ready' (the implication being that it provides information that you simply can't get from Google Maps). Commercial Navigation overlays fleet-specific restrictions like weight, height and hazmat directly onto standard digital maps to provide accurate turn-by-turn directions. By combining this with information such as hours-of-service within the Samsara Driver App, drivers can access what they need in a single location to remain compliant and on time. The Home Depot was speaking on stage this week, outlining its experience with Samsara and how its safety technologies translate into measurable business outcomes. Kathleen Eaton, Vice President of Safety, Energy & Building Services at The Home Depot, described the company's journey with Samsara's technology across its fleet of thousands of drivers in delivery and technician roles. She says: Since inception: [we've had an] 80 percent reduction in accidents on the delivery side of our business, and over a 60 percent reduction in overall claims with our technicians. Those are real dollars and cents, and we are a self-insured company, so eventually that turns into cash flow, and that cash flow can either go back to the bottom line or it gives me the ability to say I would like some of that savings back so I can continue to invest in tools and technologies that will help keep us safe. The Home Depot has been testing Samsara's worker safety wearable technology, recognizing that many of their drivers are also lone workers operating in uncontrolled environments. Eaton explains: We don't control the weather, we don't control the job sites that they're going to or the construction sites that they're at, and we certainly don't control the environment of the customer's home where they're going to make a delivery or do some sort of installation. The psychological safety aspect of the technology has proven particularly valuable: There's a psychological safety associated with somebody knowing where I am, when I should be there, they can do a check-in, I can do a check-in back. The company's approach to driver safety has evolved beyond just preventing accidents to fundamentally changing driver behavior both on and off the job. Eaton says: They say that a picture is worth 1,000 words; a video is worth about 10,000 words when you are impacting behavior. It's been really incredible to see our associates simply become better drivers behind the wheel, and that is everything from them being more aware of their own behavior, but also aware of all of the behavior of the people that they're sharing the roadway with. Today it was clear that Samsara views itself as still being in the early stages of its transformation of physical operations. While the company has achieved significant scale - recently crossing $1.5 billion in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) - the total addressable market for connected operations remains largely untapped. Biswas concluded in his keynote remarks: "We see it helping keep everyone safe. We see it helping make operations more efficient, a little bit easier every single day. We want to make every part of your operations even smarter, and these technologies are helping improve safety and efficiency at scale." There is still more to do before Samsara can fully claim to be 'the system of record for physical operations', particularly as it expands beyond safety use cases into areas beyond fleet management (we want to see more use cases on that front). However, I've spoken to customers who are excited about the additional asset tracking capabilities being pushed by the vendor and they have all commented on how Samsara works closely with them to build out features. The workflow technology and some of the agentic AI features are coming along, but these will likely be expanded as more data flows into the system. However, for an industry that has historically been underserved by technology innovation, Samsara's latest announcements represent a significant development toward the kind of intelligent, data-driven operations that have transformed other sectors of the economy. I have been pleased to see that the company is starting to make use of its network and data across the network to guide product development. Whilst the data companies receive at an individual level is valuable, there's no doubt a huge amount of information to be gleaned from looking at this data as a whole - and using that to provide insights to customers within the platform.

Samsara adds AI-powered tools to boost fleet safety and worker protection - SiliconANGLE

Samsara adds AI-powered tools to boost fleet safety and worker protection Internet of things cloud platform provider Samsara Inc. today unveiled a broad set of new artificial intelligence-powered solutions that are aimed at transforming safety, efficiency and operational intelligence across the physical operations sector. The company's latest offerings include updates to its Connected Operations Platform with innovations spanning vehicle safety, routing, maintenance and worker protection, both inside and outside the vehicle. Leading the list of announcements is a suite of new AI Safety Intelligence tools that are designed to help fleet operators detect risk and prevent incidents in real time. Among the new features is the AI Multicam system, which allows up to four high-definition cameras to be mounted around a vehicle, offering 360-degree visibility with real-time hazard alerts. Other updates include weather overlays, automated coaching for lean safety teams and in-app driver recognition programs that reward safe behavior. The Samsara Driver App has also been overhauled with end-of-day reviews and short-form training videos to engage drivers and reinforce safety practices. The new version also gives managers access to trend analysis across drivers and routes that provides a broader view of behavioral patterns rather than isolated events. The company also introduced the Samsara Wearable, a lightweight safety device designed for frontline workers that offers fall detection, real-time location sharing and one-click access to emergency services. The wearable device has a remarkable battery life of more than one year, negating the need for daily charging, which Samsara says is typical for most wearable devices in industrial settings. On the logistics side, Samsara is introducing new Route Planning and Commercial Navigation capabilities to help fleet operators move away from outdated mapping systems and manual route building. The new tools integrate with sales systems to create optimized delivery schedules and factor in traffic, weather and regulatory requirements. According to Samsara, early users are seeing up to 15% fewer vehicles needed for deliveries and significant reductions in route planning time. Maintenance and compliance also get a look-in, with enhancements including voice-to-text Driver Vehicle Inspection Report reports, fault code intelligence and AI-generated work orders. The platform additionally also now supports invoice scanning to reduce manual data entry and offer better visibility into repair costs and timelines. Lastly, Samsara also today announced a new integration with HappyRobot Inc., an AI voice automation platform that handles more than 20 million logistics conversations annually. The partnership will allow Samsara customers to use agentic AI for driver communications, scheduling, hiring and contract negotiations, all through the Samsara App Marketplace. "Thanks to rapid advancements in AI technology, we've been able to build new products that are now empowering drivers to make better decisions on the road and equipping safety teams with the tools for faster, more effective feedback," said Johan Land, senior vice president of product and engineering at Samsara. "AI is increasingly becoming a powerful ally in protecting drivers, and Samsara is at the forefront of this trend."

Beyond safety - CTO John Bicket explains how Samsara is methodically building the system of record for connected operations

Samsara is in the midst of an evolution from being a safety-focused telematics provider to what it envisions as the comprehensive system of record for physical operations. Speaking with CTO and Co-Founder John Bicket at the company's Beyond conference in San Diego this week, it's clear that Samsara's ambitions are beginning to extend well beyond its key use case for customer adoption (safety) - but the path there is measured, customer-driven, and grounded in the realities of industries that have been historically resistant to digital transformation. However, what's particularly interesting about Samsara's approach is how it has used safety as a wedge to establish trust and demonstrate value in sectors where pen-and-paper processes still dominate. Now, with that foothold firmly established, the company is systematically expanding its platform to include a fuller spectrum of physical operations - from route planning and maintenance management to asset tracking and workforce safety beyond vehicles. The safety wedge strategy pays dividends Bicket's enthusiasm for the expanding use cases is evident, but it's tempered by a clear understanding of why safety remains the entry point for most customers. As he explains during our conversation, the ROI on safety programs is "so good" that organizations can implement dash cams, run safety programs, and see dramatic reductions in accidents and insurance costs - all within about six months. Bicket says: It's all very contained, so they can just go do it. They do the before and the after, and then they're like, 'Clearly, this delivers real value'. This isn't just vendor speak. Yesterday we heard how The Home Depot has seen an 80 percent reduction in delivery-related accidents and over 60 percent reduction in overall claims since implementing Samsara. For a self-insured company, those translate directly into cash flow that can be reinvested in further technology improvements. But here's where Samsara's strategy is evolving. Once those dash cams are installed for safety purposes, they're also capturing telematics data. And once customers see the value from safety programs, they're primed to explore what else that data can do for them. Bicket explains: Usually when they're installing the dash cams, they're going to do telematics at the same time. What we've generally seen is that there's a second or third series of projects that the customers just immediately do because it's already there and it's a case of just kind of turning it on. The importance of hardware investment A counterintuitive element of Samsara's strategy is its continued investment in hardware development, even as the broader technology industry pivots toward software-only solutions. Bicket's explanation of this choice reveals how Samsara thinks about serving its customers: Obviously, if you could do it all through software, it's just frictionless, and that's the nice thing about it. The most difficult thing about the hardware stuff, especially with our customers, is actually the installation and the management of it. Yet Samsara persists with hardware for strategic reasons. First, it ensures ownership of the stack across diverse operational environments, citing the variety of vehicle types that customers operate. Bicket says: Having our own piece of hardware there lets us be consistent across a bunch of different things. More importantly, hardware enables capabilities that software alone cannot deliver. When discussing the new wearable device announced yesterday, Bicket recounts how Samsara initially tried to create a panic button feature in software only: There were a lot of cases where they needed to have the button -- they can't just hit the panic button on their phone in the situations that they are in. This hardware investment also serves a dual purpose in Samsara's platform strategy. Not only does it solve immediate customer problems, but each piece of hardware becomes another data collection point, feeding the expanding platform with more contextual information. The asset tags tracking equipment, the wearables monitoring worker safety, the dash cams capturing road conditions - all contribute to a richer operational dataset that enables more sophisticated platform capabilities. From safety to operational intelligence The progression Bicket describes follows a logical pattern: safety first, then fuel efficiency programs (which use similar coaching methodologies), then maintenance optimization, and eventually into more complex areas like route planning and comprehensive workflow management. Each step builds on the trust and infrastructure established by the previous one. This sequential approach addresses a fundamental challenge in digital transformation for physical operations: these organizations often have multiple systems, acquired companies with different technology stacks, and deeply entrenched processes. As Bicket notes, most larger companies "have actually done at least one acquisition internally" and "usually actually have multiple groups that might be running different stacks across their ERP applications." The complexity this creates can't be understated. When Samsara announces new features for maintenance or route planning, Bicket explains, the real work is in understanding: How are these going to get deployed in the organizations? We kind of need to show wins at every step along the way. And we're probably going to have to coexist with other systems. Physical operations leapfrogging traditional IT The dynamics Bicket describes around how physical operations companies are approaching digital transformation reveal a surprising shift from conventional enterprise IT patterns. In several conversations, he notes an unexpected eagerness to bypass traditional IT bottlenecks. Bicket says: I had three conversations today where folks were a little bit like, 'Hmm, if I don't have to do an integration with the IT department, we actually might be able to roll something out much faster'. They were the ones really pushing the envelope. This represents a significant shift from just a few years ago, when these same organizations might have been characterized as technology laggards. The catalyst? According to Bicket, widespread AI adoption among the workforce is helping. When one presenter asks conference attendees how many had used ChatGPT or Gemini in the last week, Bicket observes that "more than 80% of the hands went up, which is just amazing to see that kind of rollout, or that kind of change happen so fast." This adoption makes more sense when you consider the unique position of physical operations workers. Unlike office-based knowledge workers who might view AI as a threat to their jobs, drivers, technicians, and field workers see AI as a tool that eliminates tedious administrative tasks without threatening the physical nature of their work. Bicket explains: Folks are really starting to push the envelope, they're really understanding there's a lot of things that these AIs can do that eliminate a lot of work that was just not that fun - whether it's data entry or other stuff. This dynamic creates an interesting paradox: industries that were slow to digitize might actually leapfrog traditional enterprise IT adoption patterns because their workers are less threatened by and more eager to embrace AI assistance. They're not worried about AI replacing them behind the wheel or in the field - they're excited about AI handling the paperwork they never wanted to do in the first place. The network effect emerges As noted in my previous piece, Samsara's scale is now enabling capabilities that individual organizations could never achieve on their own. With 120 billion API calls and 14 trillion data points flowing through its platform, the company has visibility into operational patterns across industries and geographies that it's beginning to use in interesting ways. The new Street Sense capability announced this week highlights this approach. By aggregating anonymized dash cam imagery from millions of connected vehicles, Samsara can provide near real-time visibility into road conditions and weather impacts across vast areas. During the keynote demonstration, the system shows images from flood zones in Texas with timestamps from just seconds earlier. It also allows Samsara to provide contextual awareness to why and how drivers made certain decisions - decisions that they may have been penalized for, if the AI didn't have the broader context of what risks were at play. But the network effects go beyond weather monitoring. Bicket sees particular value in benchmarking capabilities that help customers understand their performance relative to peers. This isn't about abstract metrics - it's about actionable insights that can drive specific improvements: If we come back to them and say, four out of five things you guys are in line with and don't really need to work on. But if we say, we see a lot more speeding in your organization than is typical...it's much easier to take action on it rather than it being just an abstract idea. The workforce and asset expansion Samsara's push into workforce and asset management reveals how far the company's ambitions extend beyond its original vehicle-focused offerings. The new wearable device announced this week, capable of more than a year of battery life by leveraging the Samsara network rather than cellular connectivity, extends safety capabilities to workers operating outside vehicles. The asset tracking capabilities introduced last year are already showing significant returns. Bicket shares that some organizations are reporting savings of "tens of millions of dollars of losses per year" by recovering equipment that would otherwise disappear. One customer discovers millions of dollars in theft recovery opportunities they "didn't really have great visibility into before." Yet even with these successes, Bicket acknowledges that many customers are still determining optimal deployment strategies: They actually have been going through and doing a couple trials with it and figuring out exactly where to put this. For them, they need to do a little bit of ROI calculation. Where Samsara's platform strategy becomes most apparent is in its approach to workflows. Rather than simply collecting and analyzing data, the company is increasingly focused on how that data integrates into daily operations. Bicket's conversation with a natural gas and propane delivery company illustrates this evolution. He explains: We were really discussing and mapping out the workflows and the driver's whole day. How do they plan their work in the morning? Where does the information live that they generate the orders from to figure out where they need to stop during the day? The discussion covers everything from route sequencing to customer notes, from tank level monitoring to hazmat compliance, from ERP integration to automated documentation. It's a comprehensive view of operations that goes far beyond simple vehicle tracking. While AI underpins many of these advances, Samsara's approach is more grounded compared to the AI hype dominating much of enterprise technology. Bicket frames it as giving "superpowers to the safety admins" - augmenting human capabilities rather than replacing workers. The AI implementations announced this week - from contextual analysis of driving events to voice-to-text conversion for inspection reports - are targeted at reducing friction in existing workflows. This pragmatic approach reflects both Samsara's understanding of its customer base and the unique dynamics of physical operations work. The platform play takes shape What emerges from these conversations and announcements is a picture of Samsara methodically building toward its vision of becoming "the ERP platform for the physical world." But unlike traditional ERP implementations that require massive upfront investment and organizational change, Samsara's approach allows customers to start small - typically with safety - and expand based on proven value. This incremental strategy addresses the reality that Bicket articulates: customers need help with sequencing. They need to understand which projects to tackle first, how to build internal momentum, and how to demonstrate value at each step. By starting with safety's clear ROI and expanding into adjacent areas that leverage the same infrastructure and data, Samsara provides a roadmap for digital transformation that feels achievable rather than overwhelming. The third-party integration capabilities Bicket discusses - the "open platform" - further reinforce this approach. Rather than forcing customers to abandon existing systems, Samsara is building to coexist and complement. This is particularly important for the route planning capabilities, where Bicket describes how Samsara offers everything from basic stop sequencing tools for simpler operations to full dynamic routing for more sophisticated fleets - allowing customers to adopt the level of technology that matches their current operational maturity. As Samsara continues to expand its platform capabilities, the focus remains firmly on delivering value at each step of the journey. Bicket says: We basically have to earn their trust that these do result in wins. We've been spending a lot of time in the last few years, really trying to understand: where are they spending money? Where do they believe the wins are? My take It's been a very interesting week so far at Beyond. There's clear momentum at the company, but some hurdles do remain for Samsara. Many organizations in the vendor's target markets still rely heavily on manual processes. The company's asset tracking offerings are still in early adoption phases as customers work through ROI calculations. And while the AI capabilities are impressive, they still require careful change management to ensure adoption. Moreover, as Samsara expands its platform capabilities, it increasingly competes with established players in spaces like TMS and route optimization. The company's advantage lies in its integrated approach and the trust it's built through safety programs, but converting that advantage into dominance across multiple operational domains won't be automatic. Yet the opportunity is clearly there. Bicket's observation about the rapid advancement of AI models suggests that applications previously impossible are becoming viable. Combined with a customer base that's surprisingly eager to embrace AI - precisely because it enhances rather than threatens their physical work - Samsara may have found the perfect moment to accelerate its platform ambitions. The vision of becoming the system of record for connected operations is ambitious, but Samsara's methodical approach makes it achievable. By meeting customers where they are, showing value at every step, and building on established trust, the company is creating a new playbook for digital transformation in physical operations. As I've noted previously, plenty of IoT platform providers have struggled to find sustainable business models. Samsara's focused, application-specific approach has not only delivered clear ROI for customers but positioned the company to capture a much larger opportunity. The next few years will reveal whether this methodical expansion can maintain momentum as the company moves beyond its safety stronghold into the full complexity of physical operations.

From paper to AI - how Samsara is helping agriculture, food distribution, and chemical companies digitize operations

For decades, entire industries that rely on physical operations have carried out work on clipboards, paper logs, and manual processes. While office workers embraced digital transformation, drivers climbed ladders to check tank levels, dispatchers managed with paper routes, and safety managers reviewed incidents weeks after they occurred. At Samsara's Beyond conference in San Diego this week, however, three enterprises shared how they're navigating a transformation from pen-and-paper processes to AI-powered operations. A customer panel brought together leaders from sectors where technology adoption has traditionally been slow: Kyle Springs from agricultural giant Nutrien, Kevin Thomas from food distributor Sysco, and Rob McRae from chemical distributor Univar Solutions. What became apparent from their discussion was how they've all aligned on similar approaches despite operating in vastly different industries. They're not trying to revolutionize everything at once. Instead, they've found that starting with safety - an area where ROI is immediate and clear - creates a foundation for tackling bigger operational challenges. The scale of operations these companies manage helps explain why digital transformation in these sectors presents unique challenges. Nutrien, as Springs explained, is "the largest agricultural retailer in the world," operating across 500 million acres globally with over 500,000 customers. The company delivers agricultural inputs to farms that often lack physical addresses - locations described by Springs as often being along the lines of "the Anderson farm plot 17 that they bought from the Smiths, that's just past the large oak tree on the right." Sysco operates approximately 17,000 tractor trailers daily, serving 200,000 customers across North America, Latin America, and Europe. As critical infrastructure with 76,000 employees, the company faces the dual challenge of maintaining safety standards while meeting complex delivery obligations. Univar Solutions manages "several hundred facilities around the globe" as the largest chemical distributor in North America. The nature of their cargo - chemicals that "can go boom, can burn, and can hurt" - adds layers of complexity to their safety and operational requirements. These aren't organizations that can afford to experiment with unproven technology. Every operational decision impacts safety, efficiency, and in many cases, regulatory compliance. However, all three have found success with Samsara's platform to connect and digitalize operations. Each company's journey began with safety - the use case that they all saw delivered the most immediate and measurable value. This aligns with what Samsara CTO John Bicket described to me this week as the "wedge" strategy: safety programs show clear ROI that organizations can implement them quickly and see results within months. For Univar Solutions, the safety story is particularly acute. As McRae described: If you're on top of a tanker filling up hydrochloric acid at two in the morning and you're alone., what recourse do you have if you slip and fall? Or if you're in British Columbia, and you're offloading a rail car, and somebody is down below 150 feet away, and they can't hear it over the pump, and it's the winter? The company has been testing Samsara's new wearable technology - a small device that has a year of battery live, forward facing cameras, and a large panic button - to address these lone worker scenarios directly. McRae explained: We have guardrails on those rail cars, but we still have safety incidents. Things do happen, and this adds yet another layer of protection and safety, given the nature of what we move is at the forefront and the leading edge of every decision we make. Sysco's approach to safety has evolved significantly through AI adoption. Thomas emphasized how the company has positioned the technology: Embracing AI...there's been a lot of communication around it, communication planning, on how we posture the technology as a tool, but also a tool to enhance the delivery partners' experience from a safety standpoint. And there have been clear wins. Nutrien saw an "immediate 50% reduction in unsafe driving" after implementing Samsara's safety platform. Now in year three of their partnership, Springs reports "a vast decrease in vehicle accident rate." But the impact extends beyond their own drivers: It's not just about our drivers. Our goal is to send our employees home safe every day. It's the communities that we operate in. What's particularly interesting about these implementations is how they've evolved from simple monitoring to predictive coaching, powered by AI. Univar Solutions' experience illustrates this progression clearly. Initially, the company used camera footage "to reinforce the system that we use for driving techniques, habits, coaching and developing better behaviors off of sudden stops." But McRae discovered an unexpected benefit: What we found, though, is we're also getting alerts when drivers are doing something right, as many of you saw in the demonstration videos earlier this morning - such as avoiding a collision. This contextual awareness from the Samsara system - where drivers are validated when they suddenly break, for example, to avoid a pedestrian on a bike - shifts behaviour change from punitive to positive reinforcement. This has created what McRae calls a "flywheel effect of safety." The company now posts videos of drivers avoiding collisions on their internal platform called "the hub." McRae says: They're actually the highest clicked on components of the hub, and it only grows the more engagement we get with our internal employees. Sysco's Kevin Thomas also highlighted how AI enables proactive risk management at scale: The tool allows us to get ahead of risk behaviors that may be happening in the cab to mitigate critical events or incidents. We have approximately 17,000 tractor trailers that operate on the roadways on a day-to-day basis. So a tool like the AI features that Samsara is offering now allows us to get ahead of mitigating circumstances. Once these companies established successful safety programs, they discovered the infrastructure they'd deployed could address other operational challenges. For Nutrien, the expansion into routing and navigation solved a critical challenge in agricultural delivery. Springs explained: When you're bringing a new driver into our organization, the ability to route and plan just helps get them where they're supposed to be, helps them find the farm. The dynamic nature of agricultural operations means trucks loaded with products often don't know their final destination when they leave the depot. Samsara's platform enables real-time coordination: The ability to get notifications from your your customer, and say, I have a truck in that area that has that product on it, and tell them an estimated time they can be there through the routing and planning activity, and help them find where they're supposed to be, all goes hand in hand. This capability has aided efficiency while enhancing safety. Springs says: This eliminated a lot of our distractions on the road. One of the reasons why we have Samsara in our vehicles is to eliminate phone calls and eliminate use of cell phones. Now we can communicate with that driver. We can change routes, change plans, have more safe, efficient drivers on the road. The move into asset tracking shows another layer of digital transformation for these companies. Nutrien's tank monitoring system exemplifies how digitization can eliminate inefficient manual processes while improving customer service. Springs explains: Historically, we have to go out to that tank. We have to look at the tank. We have to either climb the ladder and dip the tank, or use a side gage or some method of manual measurement. With over 500,000 customers spread across a service area where locations might cover "100 mile radius," this manual approach was unsustainable. The digital solution provides multiple benefits: We get a notification when the tanks are below a certain level. We can order another truckload to be delivered there. But it also addresses a business intelligence challenge: It's also very helpful to know that we're the ones that put the product in that tank, if we're providing it, and that maybe we didn't get a tank filled by another competitor with the same product. All three panelists expressed interest in Samsara's new Asset Tags, which were announced last year. Thomas sees regulatory implications: There's some regulatory implications now for food distributors that we have to track our assets throughout the logistical supply chain, life cycle, that's a requirement now. For Univar Solutions, McRae highlighted the financial impact of lost assets: Tote replacements and lost totes - many people have similar equipment that they'll push out to the field, to a customer, to a supplier, and it sits there. You have some sort of static tracking device, or static tracker, but then you lose it. Somebody leaves, or somebody goes somewhere. You lose the file. And six months go by and you've lost the asset. You have a choice, do you replace it, or do you just go without it? Generally, you have to replace it and that gets expensive. A crucial theme throughout the discussion was how these companies have positioned AI and digital transformation to their workforce. Unlike many enterprise technology implementations that face resistance, these organizations found their employees surprisingly receptive - largely because the technology augments rather than threatens their work (that being the nature of physical operations!). Thomas emphasized Sysco's approach: AI as a tool. It's not meant to be intrusive. It's not meant to alleviate roles. It's meant to be a technology or a tool to be more efficient, more productive. McRae's perspective on Samsara's AI coaching capabilities reveals why this messaging resonates: As we look at managers and supervisors and salary folks, we want to promote them up. We want to take the best and we want to try and take what they do right and disseminate it out across our organization. These AI agents are remarkably skilled at extracting the best ways to communicate with that blue collar workforce and drive value and promote the positive. The psychological safety aspect has proven equally important. For workers operating alone in hazardous conditions, the technology provides peace of mind. As Thomas noted: There's a psychological safety associated with somebody knowing where I am, when I should be there, they can do a check-in, I can do a check-in back. Another important outcome these companies reported wasn't operational metrics but cultural change. Sysco's Thomas described how the company has worked to bring "all 76,000 colleagues of Sysco along the safety journey, the culture journey." This included establishing a safety tagline ("Safety is our main ingredient") and even creating a safety character named Shelford. The technology implementation has reinforced these cultural initiatives. Thomas explained: Integrating best practices of leveraging a tool like Samsara has been very seamless in showing our colleague based on how our executive leadership team and how our leaders in the organization embrace them, going home safe every day. While all three companies reported impressive safety statistics - Univar's 40% reduction in incident rates, Nutrien's 50% reduction in unsafe driving, Sysco's improved incident metrics - the panelists emphasized that success extends beyond numbers. Thomas articulated this broader view: It's not all about those metrics. It's about caring about our people, driving together is one of Sysco's core values. So, how do I integrate those core values from a cultural standpoint that would lead us down the path of improving the incidents and incur client calls? For Univar Solutions, the partnership has delivered unexpected strategic value. McRae reflected on the company's five-year journey: Who would have thought five years ago, replacing an ELD would lead to a 40% reduction in our incident rates on our private fleet? It is remarkable. The panelists' enthusiasm for Samsara's expanding capabilities suggests these digital transformation journeys are far from complete. Each highlighted different areas of future investment - many that align with what we have heard this week about how Samsara is expanding its platform. For McRae, transportation intelligence tools represent the stage: There's lots of different TMS software out there, and I feel like for years, people have talked about it, but not really demonstrated the AI. How do you pull in the driver hours? And how do you look at the maintenance of the vehicles? And the true repair and maintenance spend? And how do you get one platform that truly understands your entire operation holistically? Thomas sees opportunity in Samsara's warehouse and productivity solutions: "transitioning from archaic paper, manual processes to more digitized processes that embraces our organization strategy of digital transformation." Springs, despite potential procurement challenges, is most excited about personal safety devices for lone workers: