Samsara is a global leader in connected operations platforms, helping organizations improve the efficiency, safety, and sustainability of their physical operations. From logistics and transportation to manufacturing and construction, Samsara’s technology empowers frontline industries to work smarter and safer. Headquartered in San Francisco, with nine offices worldwide, the company has grown rapidly in both size and scope.
Within the company, the Technology Experience team, led by Nicole Smith, plays a pivotal role in enabling this growth. The team oversees IT services, portfolio management, engineering operations, and the global help desk. Their mission is to ensure employees have seamless access to the tools and support they need to do their best work. For years, automation has been central to that mission. Samsara already ran more than 60 integrations and workflow automations on Workato, and when Workato introduced its AI-powered agents, the team saw an opportunity to take their IT service experience to the next level.
The Challenge: Rising Costs, Limited Control, and the Need for Agility
By 2023, Samsara’s IT team found itself at a crossroads. Their existing helpdesk solution, embedded in Slack, was becoming increasingly expensive. Renewal costs were increasing, and the vendor was asking for additional investment to unlock features that should have been standard. The economics no longer made sense.
Cost wasn’t the only pain point. The platform also lacked extensibility. Any customization required filing tickets, working through Customer Success Managers and Account Executives, and waiting months for updates. For a fast-growing company like Samsara, this lag made it difficult to adapt to user feedback or introduce new capabilities. The IT team needed a solution that gave them more control and agility.
At the same time, the team was also eager to explore artificial intelligence. They understood the potential of AI to make support faster and more intuitive, but they also knew that trust was on the line. Employees had grown accustomed to high-quality service, reflected in customer satisfaction scores that hovered around 97 to 98 percent. Any new solution had to maintain, if not improve, the overall experience.
The Solution: Deploying Workato’s IT Genie
Initially, the team experimented with building their own bot using the OpenAI API Assistant. However, this approach required significant engineering resources and ongoing maintenance. When Workato launched IT Genie, an AI agent purpose-built for helpdesk processes, the choice became clear.
IT Genie came with Slack and Zendesk connectivity, which eliminated the need to design the entire framework from scratch. Workato also handled the heavy lifting of managing OpenAI updates, which helped ease the burden of API maintenance for Samsara’s engineers. Most importantly, IT Genie was low-code and highly configurable, which gave the team the ability to make changes quickly and directly in response to employee needs.
As Nicole explained, “We basically realized we were trying to build the Genie, and someone just gave us the lamp. We rubbed it, and the Genie appeared.”
The rollout was as much about culture as it was about technology. Instead of positioning IT Genie as a finished product, the team introduced it as a “baby bot” that was still learning. Employees were encouraged to test it and share feedback. This transparency created a sense of partnership and helped employees feel invested in the success of the new tool rather than skeptical of its abilities.
Impact: Cost Savings, Efficiency, and Better User Experience
The benefits were immediate. By replacing the legacy tool with IT Genie, Samsara reduced costs while gaining the flexibility to adapt and innovate at their own pace. Instead of waiting months for vendor updates, the IT team could implement user-requested changes in a matter of minutes.
Despite the shift, Samsara’s customer satisfaction score remained steady at 97 to 98 percent. In fact, employees embraced the faster, more transparent support experience. The scale of automation also grew rapidly. The company went from running 4 million automated tasks to more than 40 million in just six months, with no degradation in performance owing to Workato’s enterprise-grade infrastructure.
Looking ahead, Samsara plans to expand the use of Workato’s agents beyond IT and into other areas of the business where employees frequently seek support. Finance, HR, and operations are all candidates for custom Genies that can streamline requests, provide instant answers, and integrate with core systems. By treating AI not as a replacement but as a partner, they are laying the foundation for a workplace where employees spend less time navigating processes and more time focused on impactful work.