Waymo has about 3,000 robotaxis. Samsara has millions of trucks already wearing cameras.
Now the fleet company is using all that footage to sell cities a real-time map of their broken roads.
Samsara spent the last decade putting cameras inside commercial trucks for safety, theft, and insurance claims.
Now the company is using all that footage to train AI that spots potholes. The new product is called Ground Intelligence, and it runs as a dashboard that tags potholes on a city map.
The AI also tracks how fast each pothole is getting worse. That gives city crews a way to plan repairs before a small pothole turns into a big one.
Cities usually find potholes by sending workers out to drive around or by sifting through hundreds of 311 calls. Samsara's pitch is that it can spot the problems first and at scale.
"That's the magic here, it takes a process that was reactive and makes it proactive," said Samsara senior vice president of product Johan Land. "That means you don't just go and fix one pothole. You plan it out."
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Potholes are just the start. Samsara wants to use the same camera network to spot:
The company already has Chicago as a new customer, with other cities under contract.
Samsara is also pushing the same camera-and-AI playbook into other industries. It announced Waste Intelligence, which helps trash companies confirm pickups, and a ridership management tool for school buses that flags unexpected boarding events.
The bet is that fleet companies become data infrastructure for cities. Samsara already has the cameras and the trucks, and AI does the rest.
Waymo and Waze announced their own pothole-sharing pilot with local governments last month. Samsara's pitch is simple math, with millions of commercial trucks driving the same streets every day instead of a few thousand robotaxis.
That repeat coverage is what city crews care about most. A pothole someone drove past in March looks very different in May, and Ground Intelligence is built to track that change over time.
Cities are also a sticky customer base. Once a public works team builds a workflow around Samsara's dashboard, swapping it out gets expensive.
That stickiness is part of why Samsara is leaning into city contracts now. It also helps explain why the company is pushing the same playbook into waste, transit, and school buses.
Samsara is a public company, and investors will be watching to see if Ground Intelligence and its sister tools start showing up in revenue. Public sector deals tend to be slow to close, but they also stick around.
The fight for who owns city street data just started.
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