The Future Of Agentic AI Has Arrived

I interviewed the vice president of corporate security, asset management, and housing at Grand Isle Shipyard. Derek Champagne discussed how he has used Samsara Agent Studio to automate fleet management and safety processes. He builds agents that automate work by speaking to the Agent Studio in plain language and telling it what he wants to accomplish. He has no background in IT.

At the Samsara user event, Champagne told the audience how he uses Agent Studio. “I had a gentleman sitting next to me who was a software guy, and I told the crowd, ‘I am not him. I’m just an everyday guy who likes to solve problems. If I can do it, you can do it.’”

Samsara is a public company with $1.6 billion in revenue in the last fiscal year. The company serves over 20,000 customers. Its platform integrates telematics, dash cameras, and AI to monitor and improve safety, fuel efficiency, and operational efficiency.

Grand Isle Shipyard services the oil and gas, power, renewables, and critical infrastructure industries. With nearly 3,000 employees, 21 facilities, and 20 service lines, GIS aligns its services with customer operations across the lifecycle of major construction projects. That lifecycle spans development, construction, commissioning, and ultimately decommissioning.

GIS has over 1,000 tagged assets. This includes over 700 trucks and roughly 300 other valuable pieces of equipment, including backhoes, bulldozers, and barges. They also track smaller items, like toolboxes used at offshore oil rigs. The fleet mainly consists of standard pickup trucks, such as Ford F-150s and Chevy Silverados, but also includes a few larger trucks, like 18-wheeler semis.

Prior to automating work with agents, a customer still needs to implement the Samsara solution. The Samsara platform can then operationalize the data associated with the organization’s assets, such as vehicles and equipment. The rich data buried in this application makes the agentic journey so valuable.