The Biggest AI Deployment Nobody Talks About | Samsara CEO Sanjit Biswas
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
These are not the tokens you're gonna find online. Like you can't crawl Reddit and find out about what happened on a construction site. The Samsara system, in a given day, we're driving 99% of the US roads, usually multiple times a day. I was just in the field last week with a large energy utility. And they shared with me a really interesting stat. They said, over the last 125 years, we've built a certain amount of grid capacity. In the next five years, we're gonna triple that. We were talking about millions and millions of vehicles. We believe we helped prevent about 380,000 car crashes, road accidents in the last year.
What is physical AI and why is it harder than software AI?
Hi, I'm Matt Turk. Welcome to the Matt
Podcast. My guest today is Sanjit Biswas, co-founder and CEO of Samsara, the $20 billion company running what might be the largest AI deployment in the physical world. Millions of vehicles, 25 trillion data points a year, driving 99% of US roads every single day. We talked about physical AI, agents for truckers and frontline workers, humanoids, autonomous trucks, and why the AI boom is really an infrastructure construction project. Oh, and if you're enjoying this episode or if you've liked others in the past, please do us a favor and hit that subscribe button. It takes a second, new episodes will show up right in your feed and it really helps the podcast. Now, here's Sanjit. All right, Sanjit, on this podcast, we've talked a lot about AI models and software agents, but we have spoken a little less about physical AI.
So this feels like the episode where we're going to talk about how AI is confronting the physical reality of transportation and construction and plants and utilities. So maybe let's start with physical AI. That's a term that we hear about more and more often these days, typically in the context of humanoids and robotaxis. So from your perspective, what is physical AI?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first, Matt, thanks for having me on your show. I would say physical AI is really the application of AI to the physical world. So if you think about the infrastructure of our planet, it's way more than just the roads where you might see a Waymo robotaxi. It's the construction sites. It's the electrical grid. It's really kind of like all the plumbing that's under the street. It's everything out there.
How does Samsara keep safety, cybersecurity, and real‑world consequences in check?
The interesting challenge, I think, with physical AI is that it's not digitized, right? Like this is a frontier where you don't have decades of bits that you can reason over and tokenize and quickly ingest. And that makes it really fascinating because the amount of value that's trapped is really significant. So we think about it in a few different ways. We think about digitizing things like location from GPS tracking, of course. We think about using cameras as sensors. So you can use that to understand the physical world in a pretty rich way, especially when you ingest lots and lots of basically video footage. If you think about how many frames you get from that, it's really significant. And then there's a lot of other kind of data sources, whether it's like weather sources of like what happened with precipitation on all the roads.
You can think about speed limit data. Like there's lots and lots of physical aspects of the world that when you put them together, when you fuse them together, there's a huge value unlock.
And maybe walk us through how AI changes that whole discussion. So, you know, there was industrial automation, obviously, that's been going on for decades and perhaps centuries. Then there was a whole wave of IoT and famously your ticker as a public company is IoT. And now there's AI.
What does Samsara actually do for fleets, construction sites and utilities?
How different is the current moment?
Yeah. Well, it's interesting you mentioned centuries because that is like the right timescale to think about physical infrastructure, right? All the way back to like the Roman era, like there's pretty significant infrastructure out there. So many of these processes of like, how do you maintain a roadway have been in place for a very, very long time. A lot of that process was manual, right? Like, let's go inspect the condition of the road.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:31
2
What is physical AI and why is it harder than software AI?
0:31–2:08
3
How does Samsara keep safety, cybersecurity, and real‑world consequences in check?
2:08–3:25
4
What does Samsara actually do for fleets, construction sites and utilities?
3:25–4:09
5
How does AI help prevent road accidents and reduce emissions?
4:09–5:34
6
How did Sanjit’s entrepreneurial journey lead from MIT research to Samsara?
5:34–6:58
7
What are the hardware components of Samsara’s stack (asset tags, gateways, dash cams)?
6:58–8:27
8
How does the new Agents Studio warranty agent compress an hour of work into a minute?
8:27–1:00:30
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck
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