Potholes are an annoying issue — just consult scooter company Lime, which identified them as an official threat to its operations in its IPO documentation last week.

The history is full of assertions that technology can assist in addressing or mitigating the pothole issue, yet they continue to exist. However, as vehicles become more equipped with sophisticated sensors, they are transforming into a resource that can promptly notify municipalities about potholes and other urban challenges.

Recently, Waymo and Waze revealed a pilot initiative to exchange pothole information with local authorities. Now, fleet management firm Samsara claims it is enhancing that concept with its own AI-driven solution termed “Ground Intelligence.”

Samsara has invested the past ten years providing its clients with cameras for installation inside millions of trucks for driver oversight, theft deterrence, and assistance with liability disputes. The San Francisco-based firm has utilized all that data to develop its own model capable of identifying various pothole types and assessing their rate of deterioration.

The premise is that trucks outfitted with Samsara technology are far more widespread than Waymo’s robotaxi fleet, which currently comprises just about 3,000 vehicles. Even as that figure increases, Samsara contends it will be able to gather more data and, importantly, more repeat data from the same sites that illustrate how potholes evolve over time.

Samsara believes this information will be beneficial to municipalities — the company announced on Tuesday that it has several cities under contract and that Chicago is beginning as a new client — and that it will be the initial component of a series of insights and data points to be provided in Ground Intelligence. Additional prospective features include identifying graffiti, damaged guardrails, low-hanging power lines, or essentially “anything that we can observe that is pertinent to a city, or also to the private sector,” stated Samsara’s senior vice president of product, Johan Land.

Typically, Land explained, cities must either send out personnel or sift through numerous 311 calls to locate these issues. It creates a lot of background noise. Samsara’s proposition is that it can provide the critical information swiftly due to the numerous commercial trucks and vans currently utilizing its cameras.

Ground Intelligence functions as a dashboard. It automatically fills in alerts on a map regarding emerging potholes and other potential concerns. It also enables cities to access anonymized footage from vehicle cameras to validate citizen reports about fallen street signs, blocked sewers, or other public infrastructure issues.

“That’s the brilliance here; it transforms a process that was reactive into a proactive one,” Land stated. “That implies you won’t just address one pothole. You organize it: ‘I know where all the potholes are in this vicinity. I head out and repair them individually, in one go.'”

Samsara is also exploring additional methods to utilize this evolving municipal surveillance framework it has created. On Tuesday, it introduced a product named Waste Intelligence, which simplifies the process for waste management firms to rapidly confirm whether their clients’ refuse or recycling has been collected. Samsara also unveiled a “ridership management” solution, which can assist in alerting bus drivers to “unexpected boarding occurrences,” or generating a “digital manifest” for school buses.