{"slug": "samsara-ride-along-pushes-fleet-safety-ai-beyond-incident-flagging", "title": "Samsara Ride Along pushes fleet safety AI beyond incident flagging", "summary": "Samsara launched Ride Along, an AI-powered virtual ride-along feature that evaluates driver behavior over continuous 10-30 minute sessions to provide a full behavioral picture rather than flagging only rare negative events. The company also introduced an in-cab conversational AI agent to handle driver questions. Early beta tester UNFI emphasized the importance of change management and driver buy-in for successful rollout.", "body_md": "LAS VEGAS — Fleet safety cameras have spent years catching drivers on their worst behavior. Samsara is betting that watching for the good moments will be more powerful.\n\nAt its Beyond 2026 customer conference in Las Vegas, the company introduced Ride Along. It’s a feature that uses AI to conduct virtual ride-along sessions of 10 to 30 minutes. It aims to produce a full behavioral picture instead of a log of rare flagged events. This feature builds on additional announcements, including an in-cab driver companion agent, a conversational AI that handles questions drivers would otherwise radio to dispatch.\n\nFor fleets already navigating the change management challenges that come with any new AI tool, the message from Samsara’s customer panel was that the rollout strategy matters as much as the technology.\n\n**What the AI Ride Along Sees**\n\nThe distinction between traditional safety monitoring and Ride Along comes down to sample size.\n\nChief Product Officer Johan Land laid out the differences. Standard camera systems flag discrete events: phone use, close following distance and harsh braking. “They’re typically fairly rare events. It’s a few events a week, of that order of magnitude,” he said.\n\nRide Along runs for a continuous window and evaluates the full session.\n\n“The difference with Ride Along is that it’s a time period, and then you get the full picture during that, which means that, as I said on stage, most of our pickup is positive,” Land said. “It’s a representative view of the driving, and therefore gives a wholly different view into it.”\n\nFleet managers can schedule sessions manually, trigger them automatically based on risk profile or use them as structured onboarding. “What we see is that many customers get them at 30, 60 and 90 days after hire, as an example,” Land said.\n\nThe output isn’t a raw clip. Managers see a summarized view with video access, and the AI assigns training when warranted. Samsara conducts AI-powered ride-alongs that assess every driver against their proprietary 22-factor standard, the Samsara Safety Assessment Standard.\n\n**Customer feedback and testing played an important role.**\n\nUNFI was among the early beta testers of Ride Along. Tehzin Chadwick, UNFI’s chief safety officer, noted her team worked with Samsara through the beta alongside UNFI’s operations staff.\n\nThat sequencing of test, flag, verify, deploy was deliberate. For Chadwick, driver confidence couldn’t be a soft metric. It was a key part of making sure the change management was in place for the drivers to work with the new technology.\n\n“We aren’t adding technology to make your lives more difficult or more complex. It’s completely the opposite,” she said. “It’s there to continue to keep you safe but also to take away any of that background noise.”\n\nOn gamification, Chadwick was direct about the limits of a one-size-fits-all approach. “We specifically try to use that for training. That works with a certain segment of our drivers who really enjoy that. And then there are some other ones that don’t enjoy that, and that’s not how they want to learn,” she said. UNFI now offers drivers a menu of training formats and lets them indicate their preference.\n\nSanjit Biswas, Samsara’s CEO and co-founder, said that kind of driver buy-in shows up in the data. On leaderboards, competition becomes self-reinforcing.\n\n“A lot of drivers take their safety score super seriously because they’re competing,” Biswas said. “I sometimes do ride-alongs with drivers, and they’re like, ‘Why’d I get a 98?’ And that’s the kind of thing we love to see because it’s a positive feedback loop, and the majority of drivers do a great job every day.”\n\nThe old framing, he said, got the incentive structure wrong. “These historical systems had shown that they would call you out on events when you did something bad,” Biswas said.\n\n**Voice agents to make driving a less lonely job**\n\nThe Ride Along feature runs on recorded video. A separate product announced at the conference operates in real time. It is a conversational AI companion for the cab.\n\nThe driver briefing agent, currently in beta, speaks to drivers before and during shifts. It can cover safety scores, weather conditions, route notes and policy questions. Fleet managers configure it in plain English through Agent Studio, Samsara’s no-code agent builder.\n\nLand described where the product is headed. “Driving is a really lonely job. You’re out on the roads, driving for many hours, and this can become a companion for drivers,” he said. “It might start sharing some other things that are interesting to them. It might even be really empowering for the driver where they can control this and customize it.”\n\nThe regulatory picture is still taking shape. Land noted that the companion agent opens every session with a disclosure: “This is AI on a recorded line.” But the exact requirements vary by state, and Samsara is helping customers work through the specifics.\n\nBiswas acknowledged the product is new ground. “This is a whole new frontier. This has never been possible before for an AI to just be chatting with the driver,” he said. “We want to make sure the drivers feel good about this and that it’s useful.”\n\nFor Chadwick, the technology is only as effective as the trust it earns. UNFI’s business, she said, runs on something AI can support but not replace.\n\n“Our business has really been based on trust, relationships, and human instinct,” she said. The technology is there to complement those three pillars.\n\nSupply Chain AI Symposium\n\nPast the hype. 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Join operators, founders, and enterprise leaders figuring out how to deploy AI in supply chain.\n\nThe Old Post • Chicago, IL[Register Now](https://live.freightwaves.com/supply-chain-ai-symposium-2026?utm_source=freightwaves&utm_medium=article-widget&utm_campaign=supply-chain-ai-symposium-2026)\n\nIndustry-defining keynotes, rapid-fire technology demos, and industry leaders networking in experiences across Chattanooga - plus the inaugural F3 Awards Dinner featuring the FreightTech and Shipper of Choice reveals.\n\nThe Signal at Chattanooga Choo Choo • Chattanooga, TN[Register Now](https://live.freightwaves.com/f3-future-of-freight-festival-2026?utm_source=freightwaves&utm_medium=article-widget&utm_campaign=f3-future-of-freight-festival-2026)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/samsara-ride-along-pushes-fleet-safety-ai-beyond-incident-flagging", "canonical_source": "https://www.freightwaves.com/news/samsara-ride-along-ai-driver-safety", "published_at": "2026-06-26 16:35:11+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-26 16:46:51.885805+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "computer-vision", "ai-products", "ai-safety", "autonomous-vehicles"], "entities": ["Samsara", "Johan Land", "UNFI", "Tehzin Chadwick", "Sanjit Biswas", "Ride Along", "Samsara Safety Assessment Standard"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/samsara-ride-along-pushes-fleet-safety-ai-beyond-incident-flagging", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/samsara-ride-along-pushes-fleet-safety-ai-beyond-incident-flagging.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/samsara-ride-along-pushes-fleet-safety-ai-beyond-incident-flagging.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/samsara-ride-along-pushes-fleet-safety-ai-beyond-incident-flagging.jsonld"}}