Samsara rolls out ‘biggest set of new product announcements ever’

SAN DIEGO—While Samsara didn’t place prizes under each attendee’s seat as it did at last year’s conference (likely taking cues from Oprah), the trucking technology provider announced it’s “biggest set of new products ever” at the Samsara Beyond 2025 user conference here in sunny California.

“I've been out in the field with you and your teams learning about how this new technology can have the biggest impact on your operations,” Kiren Sekar, Samsara chief product officer, said during the conference keynote. “I can see that the potential is immense … We're making a big, big step forward today with the largest set of new product announcements we've ever made.”

What’s new from Samsara?

AI-enhanced DVIR process

Driver vehicle inspection reports are vital to any trucking fleet, and Samsara’s DVIR workflow is the No. 1 most-used workflow on the Samsara platform. Samsara drivers complete a quarter of a billion DVIR workflows within the Samsara platform per year, Sekar said. But as with all things, the telematics provider recognized that the workflow could be improved. Here’s what’s new with Samsara’s DVIR workflow:

With the help of location detection and AI, the Samsara DVIR workflow can detect whether drivers are properly completing reports.
Drivers can dictate notes within the workflow instead of typing them.

“It’s a very simple, practical application of AI that makes for an easier experience for our drivers and makes sure our vehicles are safe when they hit the road,” Sekar said.

AI-driven maintenance management

Those DVIRs are captured in Samsara’s fleet manager dashboard, and any maintenance issues flagged by drivers will then be added to the vehicle’s status. Those issues can be resolved much more easily with Samsara’s new maintenance management offering. Now, Samsara’s maintenance dashboard offers “end-to-end” maintenance management. Here’s what’s new:

Using AI, the platform can provide explanations of vehicle fault codes and offer step-by-step solutions to resolve them.
The system now helps fleet managers determine which vehicle maintenance items are most likely to result in regulatory violations.
With a single click, fleet managers can create work orders to resolve apparent problems; the system also anticipates upcoming maintenance items and prevents downtime in the future, such as oil changes.
Additionally, fleet managers can scan repair shop invoices into the system, and—with the help of AI—assign each third-party line item to a line item within your system, relieving fleet leaders from combing through invoices each day to match mechanic repair invoices with the work orders in their systems.

With these enhancements, “now we can see a complete service history filled out in just a couple of seconds with zero manual data entry,” Sekar said, showing a demonstration of Samsara’s advanced repair order process.

Route planning and optimization

Route planning is getting a boost within the Samsara platform. Samsara can now optimize routes using the data that’s uploaded into the platform. Here’s how it works:

Using data such as customer orders, historical routes, weather, truck type, load type, driver hours of service, traffic information, and more, Samsara can plan routes for multiple drivers at once.
The goal is to increase efficiency, enabling Samsara customers to serve their customers “with more on-time arrivals and do that with fewer vehicles, fewer hours, and less fuel,” Sekar said.
The route planning tool also allows fleet leaders to add in parameters, such as orders that require hazmat certifications, orders that need pallet jacks, and those that require reefers.

Sekar shared an example where Samsara’s route planner was “able to figure out how to do all 75 orders without using my eight vehicles,” he said. “It was able to do it with just six vehicles with no overtime and just under 350 miles.”

“We love the dynamic nature of the routing solution,” Andy Yearout, Mohawk’s SVP of supply chain, said during the keynote. “The in-app, turn-by-turn directions with vehicle-specific restrictions is awesome, and the real-time traffic modeling has been really cool to play with. I'm super excited that it can take our journey even further.”

Commercial navigation for drivers

Commercial drivers who still use consumer-based navigation, such as Google Maps and Waze, are at risk of rerouting simply because consumer maps don’t consider commercial vehicle restrictions. Samsara sought to enable drivers to “navigate their routes efficiently and do it safely so they're not bouncing between screens when you want their focus on the road,” Sekar said. Here’s how Samsara’s commercial navigation works:

Audible turn-by-turn navigation is now available directly within Samsara’s driver app.
It houses information such as road, height, weight, and hazardous materials restrictions. It also houses the characteristics of the vehicle being driven.

“Their app will even come preloaded with your organization's addresses and geofences, so it's incredibly easy for them to figure out where they need to go and how to get there safely,” Sekar explained.

Weather Intelligence

One in five road accidents is weather-related, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Samsara’s new Weather Intelligence solution now helps fleets prepare for those weather events using fleet data from the entire Samsara network. Here’s how it works:

Samsara now offers public weather alerts directly in its dashboard, allowing fleet leaders to view weather events and critical fleet data on a single screen.
Fleet leaders can pull in dash camera views from drivers in their fleet to view real-time weather conditions. What’s more, fleet leaders can view near real-time dash camera footage of any fleet in the Samsara network that has allowed access. Fleets that allow access have their information hidden from the network, ensuring privacy.
Managers can also send customizable, audible alerts to drivers to warn them of weather events within their path.

“We went from a radar view to public alerts to our cameras’ visibility to this collective ‘Street Sense’ network,” Sekar said. “Now we know what's happening everywhere.”

AI-driven customer communication

Even messaging and communication with fleets’ customers have been enhanced on the Samsara platform. If a driver is late for a delivery due to a weather event or traffic delays, Samsara’s new agentic AI bot, powered by Happyrobot, can facilitate communications to the recipient of that delivery with a human-like voice and personalized communications. Sekar demonstrated it live on stage by acting as a customer receiving a call from a fleet facilitated by Happyrobot. It works like this:

Samsara customers utilize the AI program to automate external and internal messages via text, email, or phone calls.
Happyrobot can be used to communicate with sales, customer service, recruiting, back office—from reminding new driver recruits about onboarding tasks to making payment collection calls, Pablo Palafox, HappyRobot co-founder and CEO, said.
While HappyRobot follows a script, it can also handle ambiguity, Palafox said. In addition, fleet leaders also know precisely what’s happening with the bots as they provide visibility into conversations.
Essentially, Happyrobot helps fleet leaders automate time-consuming tasks, allowing them to focus on other aspects of the business.

“We're helping [fleet leaders] tackle use cases and ideas that would not be possible to have done before,” Palafox said. “This is really exciting because not only are we creating efficiencies, we're also creating new opportunities for growth, which is really, really exciting.”

“This adds yet another layer in a life-like scenario that is truly adding value,” Rob McRae, Univar Solutions VP of transportation, said, speaking of Happyrobot during a press conference. “It doesn't replace, but it certainly helps to augment that ability to coach and develop on a very specific niche in a way that resonates really, really well with drivers.”