Samsara Chief Product Officer Kiren Sekar accepted a call from the stage during the company’s Beyond conference held in San Diego this week.
It was a simulated call from an AI robot informing him that a delivery was going to be delayed due to poor weather. The AI was able to reschedule the delivery, text the driver to inform them where to go upon delivery and send a tracking link that sends real-time updates.
The kicker? The AI robot communicated with a life-like human voice and cadence.
Samsara has partnered with Happyrobot, which provides voice AI agents that automate inbound and outbound phone calls in the logistics industry. The company serves over 100 of the largest logistics operators in the world, including DHL (CCJ Top 250, No. 35) and Werner (No. 14), connecting the information systems of freight brokers, 3PLs, carriers and other enterprises to AI agents to handle check calls, load updates, payment status, appointment scheduling and sales negotiation.
“We're helping our customers get time back. We're helping their teams automate the pieces of their work they don't want to be doing, so that they can focus on what they want to work on,” said Happyrobot Co-founder and CEO Pablo Palafox. “Not only are we creating efficiencies, we're also creating new opportunities for growth.”
That was just one of Samsara’s announcements during the conference. Sekar used the call to illustrate the impact of weather on a delivery, and weather has been a big focus for the company, which has rolled out a new weather intelligence tool that overlays real-time weather data pulled from the National Weather Service onto existing Samsara dashboards to view and alert workers of imminent threats like heavy rain, snow, fire risks and more.
“Weather is a massive challenge in operations,” Sekar said. “Weather snarls supply chains. Weather grinds roads to a halt. Weather can shut down job sites. It can damage your equipment out in the field. Most importantly, weather is a major safety hazard, with one in five accidents on the road being weather related.”
Weather intelligence is part of Samsara’s larger AI safety intelligence tools, which also includes an AI multicam, safety coaching for lean teams and a revamped driver app.
Not only is the company pulling in weather data from the NWS, it’s also using its vast network of connected vehicles to allow logistics companies to see what’s happening before it happens.
Weather alerts can span several hours, lacking situational awareness, and with truckers and weather on the move, it’s hard to track what’s going to happen.
“What would be really amazing is if there was a network of millions of public traffic cameras and weather cameras that were feeding imagery into the system, and you could see it right here in the dashboard,” Sekar said. “Well, that doesn't exist, but we realized it could be possible to create that experience if we brought the Samsara community together.”
The company is using AI to strip personally identifiable information from the millions of cameras across the Samsara network and is sharing footage from those cameras to provide near-real-time weather and road condition visibility across its customer base with its new Street Sense network. Fleets decide whether they participate in sharing their camera footage.
Teams can then use AI to send out audible weather alerts to drivers that come through the speakers of their dash cameras.
“This is what it means to have true situational awareness and have the visibility and context to keep your team safe,” Sekar said.
