Fleet management company Samsara announced in May 2026 that it has developed an AI-powered platform called “Ground Intelligence” that uses cameras mounted on commercial trucks to detect potholes and monitor how quickly they deteriorate — and has already signed multiple cities to contracts, including Chicago as a new customer.
Samsara, based in San Francisco, has spent the past decade equipping millions of trucks with cameras for driver monitoring, theft prevention, and liability purposes. The company used that accumulated footage to train an AI model capable of identifying different types of potholes and tracking their progression over time. The resulting dashboard proactively flags developing road problems on a map and allows cities to pull anonymized vehicle footage to verify citizen reports of issues such as downed street signs or clogged sewers.
The company is positioning Ground Intelligence as an improvement over existing approaches. Waymo and Waze announced a pilot program last month to share pothole data with local governments, but Samsara argues its network of commercially deployed trucks is far larger than Waymo’s robotaxi fleet of roughly 3,000 vehicles — giving it more coverage and, critically, repeated data from the same locations over time.
Johan Land, Samsara’s senior vice president of product, said the platform shifts city infrastructure management from reactive to proactive. “That means that you don’t just go and fix one pothole. You plan it out: ‘I know where all the potholes are in this area. I go out and I fix one by one, in one sweep,’” he said. Typically, cities must dispatch workers or sort through hundreds of 311 calls to identify such problems.
Samsara says pothole detection is just the start. Ground Intelligence is designed to expand to other municipal concerns, including graffiti, broken guardrails, and low-hanging power lines — “anything that we can observe that has relevance to a city, or also to the private sector,” Land said.
Alongside Ground Intelligence, Samsara also announced two other products: Waste Intelligence, which helps waste management companies confirm whether trash or recycling was collected, and a ridership management tool that can alert bus drivers to unexpected boarding events and generate digital manifests for school buses.
Source: TechCrunch