From reactive to ready: Real-world takeaways on using Ground Intelligence for Public Sector

Rusty McClain has a problem many road managers will recognize. As Assistant Operations Director for the Road Commission of Kalamazoo County (RCKC) in Michigan, he oversees more than 1,200 miles of road—urban corridors, rural agricultural routes, and everything in between—with fewer than 40 operators answering 6,000 service requests per year.

I had the opportunity to ask McClain about these challenges during a recent Samsara webinar. "It's tough at times, especially when you're trying to take on the volume of those calls with such a short staff, while keeping daily productivity up during all kinds of conditions, like construction season, or in winter, when we're trying to take care of emergency situations."

With a lean team and a sprawling network, the question isn't whether you can fix every road. It's whether you can find the right problems, in the right order, before they become emergencies. Here’s how RCKC used Samsara’s Ground Intelligence for Public Sector to do just that and manage their roads more effectively. 

The problem with reactive road management

For many agencies, road defect detection works the same way it did decades ago. Staff report what they spot in the field and residents call in complaints, sometimes with a precise address, but more often not.

"You might have a two-to-three-mile span trying to find a pothole," McClain said. "People are going by pretty fast; they get a crossroad wrong—there's all kinds of factors that can make it hard to pinpoint problems."

Once a request arrives, it enters a paper-based workflow: Lists go out to crews, crews prioritize on the fly, paper returns at day's end. "Between gathering the paperwork and closing it, you might be looking at a delay of a few minutes to even a couple of days," McClain said. "And don't leave them in your lunch pail. The lists will get wet and the handwriting gets hard to read.” 

The bottom line as McClain puts it: “We're only as good as the information our residents put in."

Seeing the whole network, not just the squeaky wheels

One of the most persistent issues in road maintenance is geographic. Dense neighborhoods generate constant complaints, while rural agricultural roads often stay invisible until something fails.

Ground Intelligence for Public Sector addresses this by drawing on Samsara's network of millions of opted-in vehicles to surface AI-detected pavement defects—potholes, alligator cracks, bridge joints, and more—scoped to an agency's jurisdiction and continuously refreshed. Every detection includes a precise location, timestamp, severity rating, and video footage. Data flows within 24 hours of activation, and no new hardware is required.

When McClain's team first pulled up the Samsara dashboard, they saw defects clustered in familiar urban areas, and also scattered across the county's quiet, agricultural fringes that rarely generate complaints.

The video-backed verification also changed daily operations immediately. Before, a supervisor might spend hours driving the network to confirm whether a reported pothole was actually severe. Now, that assessment happens remotely. "We're not searching for a location that’s three trees down from somebody’s fire hydrant," McClain said. "We can see the exact location and the video footage. That’s your verification."

The dispatch math improves, too. "Instead of 10 service requests in an entire day because crews are spending most of their time driving to the next one, they can hit 20 in an area because they know exactly what’s there," he said. "They feel like they're being productive, and they really are."

Using data to advocate for more and better services

For McClain, Ground Intelligence extends beyond daily operations. It changes the conversation about funding. Leaders have constrained budgets and are asked to justify expenditures with limited evidence. Ground Intelligence provides a continuously updated, documented record of actual conditions, as opposed to periodic snapshots and subjective assessments.

"We can use data to advocate for more road funding, because all of our dollars as a public entity should be used on our roads,” McClain said. “It gives the substance behind the argument you’re trying to make to your public stakeholders."

He also framed it as a matter of fairness for the community. "How do you stretch that dollar to service a very important neighborhood with multi-million dollar homes, but give the same treatment to those people that live on County Road 1 with a dairy farm that doesn't see a lot of traffic? They should be getting the same treatment."

That's the deeper argument for continuous road intelligence: Not that it replaces good judgment, but that it gives agencies the visibility and evidence to apply that judgment more fairly, more efficiently, and more transparently. As McClain put it: "AI can be everywhere at the same time, and that’s not something a human can do. It’s a useful tool."

Looking ahead, McClain sees this as just the starting point. As Ground Intelligence continues to refresh automatically and expand its detection capabilities, agencies like RCKC will be able to shift even further from responding to road conditions to anticipating them, catching deterioration before it becomes a pothole, a claim, or a budget line item. For a small team covering a large county, that shift from reactive to proactive isn't a luxury. It's how they keep pace with the miles ahead of them.

Hear more about Ground Intelligence for Public Sector

You can hear more insights from McClain, including a live walkthrough of the Ground Intelligence dashboard with real Kalamazoo County data, in the on-demand webinar. McClain walks through exactly how his team uses defect mapping to triage repairs, how StreetSense is reshaping winter operations, and what it means for a small public agency to leverage AI at scale.

Watch the webinar to hear the full story and see what Ground Intelligence for Public Sector could do for your agency.