Samsara’s paper-thin tracking label takes aim at $35B cargo theft crisis

LAS VEGAS — Cargo theft is bleeding U.S. businesses an estimated $35 billion a year, a figure that has surged 60% year over year. Behind much of that loss lies a persistent blind spot: shippers often have no idea where their freight is between carrier scans.

On Wednesday, at its Beyond 2026 customer conference in Las Vegas, Samsara (NYSE: IOT) unveiled two products aimed at closing that visibility gap. The first is the Samsara Tracking Label, a single-use, paper-thin Bluetooth label designed to deliver near-real-time shipment location. The second is Agent Studio, a no-code platform that lets operations teams build and deploy AI workflows without needing IT support.

The Tracking Label is adhesive-backed, flexible and about the thickness of a piece of paper. It offers a 45-day battery life, contains no lithium or hazardous materials, and is approved for air, ground and rail transport. Once a shipment arrives, the label can be discarded without special handling.

What makes the label effective is the Samsara Network — a massive infrastructure of millions of connected devices spanning trucks, trailers, buses, construction equipment and warehouse scanners that cover 99% of major U.S. roads and tens of thousands of work sites. The network continuously listens for Tracking Labels, detecting their location in near-real time without requiring involvement from the carrier.

During the keynote, David Gal, Samsara’s vice president of connected equipment, spelled out the customer demand in plain terms.

“Our customers have been using asset tags to track critical shipments, and that works, but it’s not purpose-built for cargo,” Gal said. “What they’ve been asking for is a label they can slap on a box and walk away. That’s exactly what the Tracking Label is.”

The gap the label addresses is significant. Traditional carrier scans typically provide location updates only at pickup and delivery, leaving a black hole of visibility in between — even for less-than-truckload (LTL) and full truckload moves that carry thousands of dollars in cargo.

“In LTL and truckload shipping, you typically only hear about your shipment twice — when it’s picked up and when it’s delivered,” said Dave Tu, president of DCL Logistics, a third-party logistics provider and an early adopter of the Tracking Label. “Samsara’s Tracking Label changes that. It gives us a level of visibility that just didn’t exist before, and when you’re moving high-value cargo, that’s a big deal. It’s like watching your Uber driver on the way to pick you up — you can see every move, every turn, right up until it pulls up to the door.”

DCL now manages fulfillment and carrier handoff for leading brands across consumer electronics, consumer packaged goods, enterprise hardware and GPUs.

Bluetooth-based asset tracking has historically been limited by fragmented infrastructure. Zoe Roth, senior research analyst at 451 Research from S&P Global, pointed to that as the main bottleneck.

“Our data shows that organizations rely heavily on GPS and cellular technologies — adopted by over half the market — to track non-powered assets, often absorbing higher hardware costs to guarantee visibility,” Roth said. “Meanwhile, lower-cost alternatives like RFID and BLE currently sit at around 39% adoption, historically constrained by fragmented infrastructure, according to our 451 Research Supply Chain Digital Transformation Survey 2026. Providing a persistent, wide-area network for Bluetooth assets could dramatically shift this landscape, enabling scale where infrastructure has previously been the bottleneck.”

The Tracking Label is managed through a new dashboard called the Shipment Center, which pairs location data with AI-driven exception management. A shipping manager can ask which packages face delay risk from weather and focus on flagged shipments rather than monitoring every move manually. The Samsara Shipment App activates labels with a single barcode scan and connects directly to existing TMS or ERP systems, requiring no system replacement.

The second launch, Agent Studio, is available in open beta. It functions as a no-code workshop where operations teams can build and deploy AI agents from templates or from scratch.

Johan Land, Samsara’s chief product officer, tied the new tool directly to the company’s data advantage.

“Samsara has spent the last 10 years deeply embedded in the world’s most complex physical operations, giving us unprecedented visibility into what’s happening on the ground,” Land said. “In 2025 alone, we captured 25 trillion data points across the Samsara Network across vehicles, equipment, worksites, and operations. Now, customers can act on this insight by leveraging Samsara’s platform to fully automate workflows without extensive IT expertise.”

The studio ships with more than 15 prebuilt templates covering safety and maintenance. Early deployments include a driver assistance agent at a major food distributor that fields parking, weigh station and policy questions, saving 30 minutes of communication time per call, and a daily fleet briefing tool at a food bank that tracks vehicle inspection compliance.

Grand Isle Shipyard offered a clear financial perspective.

“We were spending more than six figures a year on reporting and data compilation — work that’s now fully automated,” said Derek Champagne, Grand Isle Shipyard’s vice president of corporate security, asset management and housing. “Automation allowed us to reallocate both resources and talent toward higher-value initiatives. The real benefit isn’t just efficiency; it’s the ability to focus our people on solving bigger problems, driving innovation, and creating value that simply wasn’t possible before.”

Chris Hammock, director of transportation for Graceland Portable Buildings, focused on the operational freedom the tool provides.

“Agent Studio gives us the ability to look at our own daily processes and build to fix the gaps,” Hammock said. “We can make small changes ourselves, which may save us hours, instead of entering the IT project queue.”

Tu, drawing on months of shipping high-value freight with the Tracking Label already in deployment, saw the broader trajectory clearly.

“I think this technology is revolutionary,” Tu said. “Right now, it’s predicated on reactive communication, and it’s basically switched that. So now you have proactive communication and instant visibility. The industry’s hungry for this, and it’s gonna get even better.”

This story originally appeared on FreightWaves.