At Samsara’s annual customer event, the telematics solutions provider showcased its commitment to driving technological innovation in operations and transportation through close partnerships with its users.
With over 2,000 attendees, Samsara Beyond highlighted the company’s focus on developing practical solutions to real-world challenges faced by fleet operators, drivers and workers across industries.
In an interview with FreightWaves, Samsara’s chief product officer, Kiren Sekar, emphasized the company’s customer-first approach.
“We always start with the customers, and we prioritize spending a lot of time directly with customers at events like this, but also getting out in the field, seeing their operations, spending time with their drivers, their workers, their back-office teams, and understanding the problems that they’re having,” said Sekar.
This engagement allows Samsara to identify pain points and develop targeted solutions. As Sekar noted, his team often builds prototypes for specific customer needs that end up driving enterprise solutions for all customers years later.
“[Those prototypes] might be a few years away from being primed for customers, but then we’ll go invest and build out those solutions,” he said.
Another key focus for Samsara is improving driver safety through technology-enabled coaching.
“We found that using data to identify the areas where a driver can reduce their risk, and then making that something that’s not going to punish the driver but putting it in their hands and saying, ‘Hey, here’s how you can improve,’ is really where we see the change and impact,” Sekar explained.
This approach has yielded impressive results, with customers like DHL reportedly cutting accident costs in half.
Beyond the numbers, the human impact is what resonates most. As the CPO shared, “To me, the [moments] that are most memorable include getting a note from an actual driver saying, ‘Hey, this saved my life.’”
Moving the industry forward
Samsara recognizes that technology adoption in traditional industries can be challenging.
“Technology is only half of the solution. The change management, the adoption, is just as important,” Sekar told FreightWaves.
To tackle this, Samsara focuses on long-term partnerships with customers.
“We don’t just send them a product and move on to the next thing. We really focus on these long-term engagements,” Sekar explained.
Samsara is also pushing the boundaries of asset tracking with its new product, the Asset Tag. This innovative approach takes advantage of the network of millions of Samsara gateways that are connected across customer vehicles, trailers and powered equipment.
Related: Samsara releases Asset Tag at Beyond
“It allows customers to connect any type of asset to Samsara, especially types of assets that would have been impractical to track with a cellular-based device,” said Sekar.
Looking to the future, Samsara is exploring cutting-edge technologies like satellite connectivity through a partnership with the Hubble Network. Sekar shared that Hubble will enable connectivity to Bluetooth devices from satellites in space. This could provide real-time coverage in all the places where there are not cellular devices or cellular connectivity.
Ultimately, Sekar said Samsara’s vision is clear: “Operators have seen firsthand how impactful data and technology can be in their operations, and they’re hungry to digitize more and more and more.”
The company’s focus for the year ahead is providing that digitization and working with customers and partners closely to uncover those solutions.
“It’s about using new technologies like artificial intelligence to find the insights from that data. … and then through really simple, easy-to-use, elegant software, they can take action on that data and those insights.”
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