Physical operations sector gets big AI boost – News

Physical operations has become the tangible testing ground for artificial intelligence.

Samsara Inc. is a leader in this sector, providing a cloud platform to manage transportation, field services, and logistics. The company tracks an estimated 14 trillion data points across 20,000 customers.

“We’re dealing with real issues that these large infrastructure companies have around the world,” said Stephen Franchetti (pictured), chief information officer of Samsara. “How do we ensure that their field workers are actually safe in their job sites, how do we ensure that we’re driving sustainability for those organizations, and then how do we ensure that they’re driving efficient business operations as well … At the heart, we’re really a big data company.”

Franchetti spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson at the WOW: World of Workato event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Samsara’s partnership with Workato Inc. harnesses AI in the practical world. (* Disclosure below.)

A team of Genies take on physical operations

Samsara, both a hardware and software company, installs Internet of Things, or Iot, devices such as security cameras, sensors and AI cameras. That results in a ton of data. By partnering with Workato, Samsara can manage the data from those devices while deriving new insights on the whole physical operations business, according to Franchetti.

“[We’re] gathering all those signals,” he said. “Then we do some very clever AI-related stuff and then serve that up in terms of insights to drive efficiency, sustainability and safety for our employees or rather for our customers. The interesting thing about the employee side of this is we’re also trying to mirror that internally, and that’s where Workato comes into play.”

Workato recently announced that its Genie agents would be integrated into the company’s orchestration platform. Samsara has already been taking advantage of those new capabilities. By using Workato’s IT Genie, Samsara was able to double its level of automation and IT service delivery in just a few weeks, Franchetti explained.

“The hard part in the enterprise is not necessarily the AI piece and the reasoning piece,” he added. “The hard part, arguably, is actually taking action. It’s the orchestration, it’s the workflow. And Workato, that’s kind of their bread and butter.”

Samsara also implemented a Workato Genie into its sales department, giving those employees an easier way to connect with Samsara’s knowledge base and address customer needs. As Franchetti looks toward the future, he envisions a kind of “Samsara GPT” that could handle high-level prompts for building new products or architectures.

“It’s much broader than sale,” he said. “Eventually that Samsara GPT will talk to kind of a network of genies that are behind the scenes, but we’ll be branded by Samsara GPT and we’ll have one user experience that they can drive that from.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the WOW: World of Workato event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the WOW: World of Workato event. Neither Workato Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

Photo: News