Samsara opens its fleet data to any AI agent; SAP keeps agents in Joule
Samsara and SAP put rival models for AI agent access on the market inside a fortnight: open records under the customer's own permissions, or a governed platform inside the vendor's walls. Samsara's $2.125B ARR, up 30%, with its largest customers growing more than 50%, is the early receipt for the open road.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
Two ways of selling AI agents access to company data went on sale inside a fortnight, and both want the same new line in corporate budgets: agent spend. Anyone holding IOT or SAP is in effect betting on which layer collects it. On September 22, 2026, Samsara opened its fleet records to any AI assistant a customer already uses 1. On October 6, SAP showed the opposite at SAP Connect: agents that live inside Joule, on SAP's governed platform 2. Two utility fleets walked through Samsara's gate in the same stretch, Asplundh on September 24 3 and Cadent on October 7, the day after SAP Connect 4.
The open gate already pays
MCP ships with more than 40 read-only tools that let Claude Desktop, ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot pull data on vehicles, drivers, safety events and hours of service 1. An assistant cannot see anything its user cannot already see, and every request is tied to a person 1. One Wisconsin trucking owner ran Claude against her yard records and recovered $53,000 in labor costs 5.
The open gate is also free distribution for the paid workflow layer above it: Agent Studio, introduced at the Beyond 2026 conference, gives customers two supported paths, create agents within Samsara or connect the same owned data to their own third-party AI systems 15. The base beneath is compounding. In the quarter to August 1, 2026, revenue ran $508.4M, up 30% year on year, ARR crossed $2.125B, also up 30%, and customers worth more than $1M a year generated over $500M of that ARR, growing more than 50% for a third straight quarter 6.
Quarterly revenue more than doubled in eleven quarters, from $238M to $508M
Data
| Revenue | |
|---|---|
| Q3 '23 | $237.53M |
| Q4 '23 | $276.27M |
| Q1 '24 | $280.73M |
| Q2 '24 | $300.2M |
| Q3 '24 | $321.98M |
| Q4 '24 | $346.29M |
| Q1 '25 | $366.88M |
| Q2 '25 | $391.48M |
| Q3 '25 | $415.98M |
| Q4 '25 | $444.3M |
| Q1 '26 | $478.84M |
| Q2 '26 | $508.44M |
SAP sells the guarded road
SAP's counter is governance at scale. Joule Work is live with 110,000 of SAP's own employees, with claimed 20% productivity gains across finance, HR and procurement 2. Joule Studio offers more than 70 models and the Knowledge Graph maps more than 7 million data fields, grounding agents in governed business data 2. The gate is not sealed: Joule also connects to outside agents through the Agent2Agent protocol 2.
Both doors end in a meter
The open road gets priced too. Samsara says MCP carries no extra charge today, with future costs based on monthly usage 5; SAP's release names no agent price, but the Business AI Platform is built, in its own words, to manage AI value and consumption 2. On those mechanics, both roads end in a meter; the difference is whose house the agent lives in. Three readings decide it: Samsara's first MCP price sheet, SAP's first disclosed agent consumption numbers, and whether Agent Studio workflows survive Asplundh's tens of thousands of assets, the biggest test yet of the installed base those agents feed on 13.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
