World of Workato 2025 | Stephen Franchetti, Samsara

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Stephen Franchetti

Chief Information Officer

Samsara

Samsara puts Workato’s Genies to work in the physical world

Physical operations has become the tangible testing ground for artificial intelligence.Samsara Inc. is a leader in this sector, providing a cloud platform to manage transportation, field services, and logistics. The company tracks an estimated 14 trillion data points across 20,000 customers.Samsara’s Stephen Franchetti talks about the company’s collaboration with Workato.“We’re dealing with real issues that these large infrastructure companies have around the world,” said Stephen Franchetti (pictured), chief information officer of Samsara

play_circle_outline Savannah welcomes Stephen from Samsara, reflecting on the keynote and innovation discussions.

play_circle_outline Samsara integrates IoT devices to gather critical data for enhancing efficiency and sustainability.

play_circle_outline Stephen emphasizes the importance of AI-driven enhancements for employee and customer experiences.

play_circle_outline Insights on sales genies demonstrate significant adoption and productivity benefits within sales teams.

play_circle_outline Key performance indicators (KPIs) focus on business metrics rather than just IT project success.

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Transcript

Stephen Franchetti, Samsara

Stephen Franchetti

Chief Information Officer Samsara

In this World of Workato (WOW) interview, Stephen Franchetti, CIO of Samsara, joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson to discuss how Samsara is scaling innovation by embedding AI and orchestration into physical operations. Franchetti unpacks how Samsara collects more than 14 trillion data points annually from IoT devices across 20,000 customers, transforming raw signals into actionable insights that improve safety, efficiency and sustainability.

He also highlights Samsara’s adoption of Workato’s agentic automation, including rapid implementa... Read more

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What did Stephen from Samsara discuss in his keynote at the World of Workato event? add

What kind of technology and processes does the company utilize in their operations? add

What is the role of Workato in enhancing employee and customer safety and experience? add

What were some of the announcements made at WOW that excited you, and how do you anticipate they will impact your work moving forward? add

What are some key performance indicators (KPIs) related to IT projects that have been discussed? add

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Stephen Franchetti, Samsara

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, genies, and welcome back to World of Workato here in Las Vegas, Nevada. We're coming towards the end of day 1 of our fantastic two days of live broadcast here. My name's Savannah Peterson, bringing you all the goodies with Rob Strechay. Pretty pumped that we get to have somebody who was on the keynote stage earlier today. We have Stephen from Samsara. Thank you so much for being here.

Stephen Franchetti

>> It's great to be here.

Savannah Peterson

>> I really enjoyed your keynote.

Stephen Franchetti

>> Oh yeah?

Savannah Peterson

>> And I found that really inspiring because I work across hardware and software within our organization and the devices that actually touch people. That's my area of expertise. And Samsara does precisely that. You are dealing with data, human interaction, developer interaction, a whole bunch of stuff, security, privacy, all across hardware and software. There's a lot of complexity, a lot of data. And you came in and talked about how you achieved results in just a few weeks working with Workato. So give us a little bit of history on Samsara, just in case everyone isn't as nerdy and obsessed with you as I am. And then why this stage today was such a nice opportunity to talk about the results you've achieved.

Stephen Franchetti

>> Yeah, no, certainly. And the interesting thing about Samsara is we are in the physical operations space-

Savannah Peterson

>> Which is so cool....

Stephen Franchetti

>> as you've said. And so we're dealing with real issues that these large infrastructure companies have around the world, like how do we ensure that their field workers are actually safe in their job sites, how do we ensure that we're driving sustainability for those organizations, and then how do we ensure that they're driving efficient business operations as well. And that's really what it's all about. At the heart, we're really a big data company, is really what we do. So we gather a lot of different data from across our entire network. I think I mentioned earlier on last year alone, we gathered 14 trillion data points from across our 20,000 customers that we have out there. And by the way, that's doubling every year that we move forward as a company, which is kind of mind boggling.

Savannah Peterson

>> 14 trillion data points.

Stephen Franchetti

>> Yeah. 14 trillion.

Savannah Peterson

>> Just in case folks didn't quite hear that. That's a lot.

Stephen Franchetti

>> That's a lot. And the interesting thing about it is if you think about the physical aspect of it, we're a hardware and a software company. We're actually installing physical IOT devices, these kind of cheap sensors. And they could be things like temperature sensors, they could be AI cameras in a transportation setting. They could be security cameras in a physical job site. And that's gathering all those signals and all that data, the 14 trillion data points, and shipping it back to our platform. And then we do some very clever AI-related stuff and then serve that up in terms of insights, again, to drive efficiency, sustainability, and safety for our employees or rather for our customers. The interesting thing about the employee side of this is we're also trying to mirror that internally, and that's where Workato comes into play and the whole agentic play. And it is great to see how Workato has really evolved and they're kind of reinventing themselves almost as a company now. Like everyone else, it's really focused on AI and agentics. So for us, we're really taking advantage of all that innovation that was talked about in the keynote in deploying these agents and just creating a whole different experience for our employees.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I was going to say you kind of led right to it about some of the announcements here at WOW, and really as we look out into the future, how you're going to kind of take these back with you. Because I mean, I know they're customer driven, so you probably knew about some of these prior to being here and things of that because you helped drive them.

Stephen Franchetti

>> Right. Yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> Talk to some of those announcements and what you were excited about and how you kind see that playing out as now it's becoming GA and things that have gone down?

Stephen Franchetti

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's interesting for us because I am now a two time customer of Workato. And gosh, we implemented, I was the CIO of Slack prior to Samsara. And when we implemented Workato originally, it felt like two guys in a laptop and talk about influencing the product direction. It was great for us actually back then because we could really influence the product directly.

Savannah Peterson

>> How many years ago was that when you were working with them?

Stephen Franchetti

>> That was, gosh, probably about eight years ago that we started the implementation. So it was really early on in the company's life cycle. And actually, they've maintained that ability to get that customer feedback loop and be agile about turning that into real product in terms of features within the product, which is great. And I've had preview to a lot because we're an early adopter with the agentic. I've had preview to a lot of the things that they're doing. We've tested a lot of them out. And we've given them real feedback about how the product should change over the course of time. Good examples we talked about in the keynote are things like the IT Genie and how we've doubled our ability to drive automation and IT service delivery, which is fantastic.

Savannah Peterson

>> And you were able to do that in only a few weeks, correct?

Stephen Franchetti

>> Just a few weeks. That's the last crazy thing about it. We had a previous solution. It took us probably six months or so to implement. We ran it for about two years. It's one of the industry leaders. And then we replaced that within a few weeks and we're able to double the level of automation. So it's kind of amazing that you start to layer in the orchestration with AI and the speed of implementation. It's a really powerful combination to enable us to move superfast and deploy these agents across the enterprise. So it's been fantastic.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, it sounds so cool. I love that we talked to... Workato's been talking a lot. One of the themes of the show obviously is about bringing agentic and bringing these genies into the core. You have a lot of experience bringing things from the edge to the core. I mean, this is precisely your wheelhouse.

Stephen Franchetti

>> Exactly.

Savannah Peterson

>> So how do you see this new potential that's being unlocked, impacting those lives back at the edge? Obviously safety, efficiency, what else?

Stephen Franchetti

>> Yeah, yeah. Oh gosh, we are implementing the product. We're implementing a lot of AI features. We've been around for about 10 years. And we focused on AI from the beginning. And originally it was more classic AI, it was ML, computer vision, those types of things in the physical world. And of course in the last couple of years, like everyone else, we've been really leaning into generative AI. But you think about the knowledge base that we have, and we always talk about this flywheel of data and this mountain of big data that we have, the ability to actually interact with that mountain of data across 20,000 customers who likely are having the same challenges and problems that you are in the physical world within your industry, it's incredibly powerful. Actually loading that into an LLM, being able to converse with it and get the answers that you need is just amazing. So before, it was always very transactional in nature. Now it's much more conversational and warm. I mean, when you think about it, we are in the business of safety, we're in the business of really changing people's lives ultimately. So that kind of interactivity and more warm experience is really what we're shooting for ultimately.

Rob Strechay

>> So I want to kind circle back a little bit because you talked about the 14 trillion data points and doubling. So when we're here next year, you'll talk about the 28 trillion plus or 40 some odd.

Savannah Peterson

>> Or even more at the rate of everything right now, honestly.

Rob Strechay

>> One of the things that is also a big theme within AI is just the amount of data and how different data stacks and AI stacks have to go through a transition. You alluded to your actual monetization journey. Talk us through what drove you to that point in this direction.

Stephen Franchetti

>> Yeah, it was interesting. And through the transition of Workato as a company from a kind of an iPass company to more of an AI company really within the last 12 to 18 months has been staggering, right? We've been through a very similar journey with Workato. We actually replaced MuleSoft was our first kind of foray. I think about, I've been at Samsara now for four and a half years, and pretty early on it was obvious that we couldn't move at the speed that the company was moving at, which is kind of the death knell for a CIO.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh gosh. I know, I just felt that pressure for you when you said that. Yeah.

Stephen Franchetti

>> Exactly. And the whole goal for a CIO is to move with the rate and pace of change that's going on within the organization. Samsara's moving superfast when you think about it. And so with all the things that we talked about around how we touch customers and all of that, and so for us it was about how can we get to a platform even from an iPass and an orchestration standpoint that will allow us to be agile as we continue to grow the company. And then as we started to see them transform into more of an AI and agentic company, it was kind of the obvious next step. To me, the hard part in the enterprise is not necessarily the AI piece and the reasoning piece. If you look at what's happening within AI, it's becoming a lot more commoditized. You can switch out these know LLMs and they're kind of equivalent nowadays. You get very similar results. The hard part, arguably, is actually taking action. It's the orchestration, it's the workflow. And Workato, that's kind of their bread and butter. They've got it all figured out. So we had their platform for orchestration and play. Then it was a natural extension for us to start to move into the agents and the AI piece

Savannah Peterson

>> And to bring in those genies. You said something on stage that I thought was inspiring. And you said that you were just now starting to see the art of possible with them and you were excited to do more. Give me your wild dream, fantasy. Not even fantasy, but as was also said there, if you aim high, you can get that with agents and genies, so give me your dreamy...

Stephen Franchetti

>> Gosh, I think about almost like ecosystems or fleets of agents in the future that are working with one another. And there's limited interactivity that you can get today even around that. And actually Carter in the keynote, the CIO of Workato, showed some of that where you had customer support genies talking to data genies and things of that nature. Imagine extending that out across an entire network of genies or agents that are out there. And again, you're seeing some of this with companies like Replit and Cursor where you can actually just give a prompt at a very high level, build me an architecture, build me a product, and it will go off and do the work for you. Versus you happen to be really specific about building the components yourself today and then bringing it all together. This still requires a lot of technical work. So in the future world, and we're probably a couple of years away from that, being able to give those high level prompts around building products and building architectures, I think that's where this is going to go.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's going to be really exciting. What types of things do you think that will enable for your customers? Or what pain points do you think on the Samsara side that will eliminate? What won't be a problem in a couple of years?

Stephen Franchetti

>> The interesting thing about this is going to be the impact it makes to the overall organization. And every company is thinking about this. What does it mean to your workforce? How do we upskill people to think differently about re-imagining work and re-imagining their processes and then kind re-skill and re-train people ultimately within the enterprise? And people are kind of threatened by that. But the good news about Samsara is we're a very AI-forward, AI-literate organization because we've been investing in AI for so long, and so people are really embracing it. That's the cool thing about it. And moving in that direction, figuring out how can I scale myself up so I'm ready for the shift.

Rob Strechay

>> How do you look at... Because I think also some of the beyond the people aspect was the return on investment aspect was also on display today. And what kind of KPIs do you look at when you're taking on, because as the CIO, you have probably a longer list than what to do with of projects people want you to do and solve with AI.

Savannah Peterson

>> The wish list is not true, yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. And it's not getting any shorter.

Savannah Peterson

>> Correct.

Rob Strechay

>> How do you look at the KPIs and what have been some of the KPIs that you've looked at?

Stephen Franchetti

>> Yeah, I mean the most important KPIs, and it's not dissimilar to what we talked about in the keynote with Carter and Vijay, it's really the business KPIs. I mean, that's really what we are measured on and I measure my people on. We're not implementing IT projects for IT project's sake. They have to be tied to a business metric. I'll give you one example. We implemented a sales genie effectively fairly recently. And it was amazing, actually. It's probably the most popular thing that I've done in the four and a half years that I've been CIO in terms of adoption within the sales organization. We get about 50,000 prompts on a monthly basis. We have about a thousand people in our sales organization. So it's massive adoption. But the reason it's so successful is all of a sudden we connected it to our Samsara knowledge base. Our sales folks can get access to all of the Samsara product knowledge from a technical perspective. It can write them white papers about different industry implementations that we're going after. And our business is fairly complex, right.

Savannah Peterson

>> Right.

Stephen Franchetti

>> All customers are not exactly are created equal. You think about implementing these hardware products, these IoT devices, marrying that with our software, it's been a game changer for them. And in fact, you think about the KPI associated with that, ultimately sales is all about attainment. And we found that the expert users who are using the product often say two or three times a day achieved 20% higher attainment. We did a causality analysis quarter over quarter, 20% return for those expert users, which is phenomenal. It's just really amazing. So we want more of that and those types of business metrics that we can really drive success off.

Savannah Peterson

>> I just want to follow up on that because we all know what it's like when a new technology or tool comes into an organization, not everybody is super excited to have to either upscale or train themselves or shift their current workflow. You said that this has been the most exciting and popular. It's making you popular, your homecoming thing right now in the genie world within your sales organization internally. Do you think that it was the ease of use or the general culture around it, the way that you delivered that into the org, word of mouth, what do you think was so successful for that popularity?

Stephen Franchetti

>> I think it's a combination of things. It is important to create a culture of AI within the organization. What does that really mean? And I think for us, it's driven from the top down. We are a big data and an AI company within the physical operations space. And so our CEO, he's driving that message. Not only are we doing this externally, we're really going to drive productivity internally. And that can mean everything from sales attainment. It can mean new features are rolled out much faster. We're getting product to market much more quickly. We're moving new geographies and create new business models in kind of record time. And that's how we kind of measure success around this as well. But it's not the same answer for every company. We have a champions network in place that are really driving enablement. And there's individuals from each of the functions involved in that champions network. And these are individuals who just have a passion for AI and how to implement that technology within the context of their given function. And every function is not created equal. The use cases in finance are very different from the use cases in supply chain and are very different from the use cases in sales. So the people who are going to know how to apply the technology best are the people that are closest to those use cases. So we really had to get those individuals involved. So it's kind of like a top-down, as they say, and a bottoms-up as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> So yeah, it was a combo. It was generally good communication, good buy-in, and the creativity.

Stephen Franchetti

>> Yeah. Exactly. And of course you have to have a great user experience and it has to be capable and it has to deliver the results and the technology itself. But those cultural kind of softer things around enablement clearly are very important also.

Rob Strechay

>> I was going to say, because I think one of the things that we've also seen is getting from POC to production with agents has been tough for some organizations. What do you look at as a piece of advice that you would give to other CIOs about where to start? Because again, I think it ties back into what you just said, but I want to hear from you.

Stephen Franchetti

>> Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I think the things we talked about, again, if you can get executive buy-in. And hopefully, most companies nowadays are thinking about this and there's some drive from the top, "I would create a champions network and go down that path just in the same way that we did as well." You have to experiment, and there's no question about it. Before we actually landed on Workato, we've experimented with all kinds of agentic frameworks. And everybody has one, right? You can spend your life just trying to use these agentic frameworks. And so experiment, figure out what works for you. I think Workato is a great option. But also start with the highest impacting use cases. For us, it was sales and IT was a great proving ground before we actually moved on to the sales use case, but incredible results that we saw from a very important use case and then build on that success as you move forward.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love it. It's an exciting time for you. So how are you going to continue that popularity momentum that you currently have?

Stephen Franchetti

>> It's a great question. I mean, we are expanding. We're adding more features and functionality to the existing sales genie that we have in place, but everybody wants one now, as you can imagine. What we've done is actually expand the sales genie across the entire organization. So it's not just sales focus now. The product folks are interested in getting similar answers from our knowledge base about how they best address customer needs and things of that nature. We're connecting it to other systems inside the enterprise. So it's almost becoming like the Samsara GPT, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

Stephen Franchetti

>> For the organization. So it's much broader than sales. So to get back to the kind of vision for the future, eventually that Samsara GPT will talk to kind of a network of genies that are behind the scenes, but we'll be branded by Samsara GPT and we'll have one user experience that they can drive that from.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, that's awesome. I mean, knowledge is power. And I can imagine you're unlocking a lot internally. All right, I have two final questions for you. Speaking of people, let's take your Samsara hat off just gently and briefly set it on the table. If you could design a genie right now for your personal life-

Stephen Franchetti

>> Oh my gosh,...

Savannah Peterson

>> what problem would you solve for yourself or your family?

Stephen Franchetti

>> Well, I am actually going on vacation on Thursday. And so my idea of a vacation is just taking it easy and not having too many things organized. My wife and my daughter on the other hand like to have everything organized every day.

Savannah Peterson

>> This sounds like my boyfriend and I planning our itinerary only next month.

Stephen Franchetti

>> So if I had a genie that could just design things for them and then take them away for their organized vacation where I could just kind of chill out, I'd be very happy. So that's very personal and immediate one for me. Sorry, what was the second question?

Savannah Peterson

>> No, no, no. No, that really was the question. It was more about the personal life. But I think that's really interesting. I've asked that question a couple of times on the desk today. A lot of us obviously travel a lot and we want to optimize the travel experience for our loved ones, for everybody else. I'm with you on the unstructured time though, my friend. I think we are so used to having such structured days that it's really important. You want to say hi to your wife and daughter?

Stephen Franchetti

>> Hi.

Savannah Peterson

>> I hope you all have a really great vacation. That's super important. Okay, Stephen, last question for you. Everything's moving really fast, super exciting. When we're sitting on this desk or you're giving that keynote again in 2026, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today?

Stephen Franchetti

>> Oh my goodness. I think that just the acceleration of innovation, I can't imagine, I mean, you think by how far we've come within the last few months, where we'll be in a year from now. But I hope we're going to be in a situation where, again, we're closer to that network of agents that are out there that are really working together. And we actually have more sort of macro components versus micro components that will allow us to do that. So let's see what the next year brings, but that's really what we're shooting for.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's so exciting. We cannot wait to keep the conversation going with you, Stephen. I want to talk to you about some stuff. I got a lot of ideas for storytelling about all that you're doing. You and the team are doing a great job at Samsara. And I don't say that to all of our guests. I'm just going to be honest about that. So it is truly a joy to get to chat to you. And thank you, Rob, for another great session.

Rob Strechay

>> Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> We've had so many good interviews.

Rob Strechay

>> I was going to say it's easy with great guests.

Savannah Peterson

>> It really is. We're going to have a whole flock of great guests together tomorrow.

Rob Strechay

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> And we've still got one more segment for you here left today. We've got our Insights. Hope you're all having as much fun as we are in Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here at World of Workato. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.