%20(2).png)
Risk in commercial auto is rarely invisible. It shows up in a new violation, a license change, or a hard-braking event days before a crash. The harder problem is acting on what you can already see, early enough to change the outcome.
That gap between visibility and action is widening, and it is costly for everyone. SambaSafety’s 2026 Driver Risk Report shows jury awards over $100 million increased 81% in a single year. The behaviors behind those losses are identifiable and largely preventable, with distracted-driving violations climbing 31% over the past two years.
The risk and underwriting leaders we talk with describe the same gap firsthand.
An underwriting manager put it plainly:
“Typically, if an incident or violation happens, we might not know for two years until we run their MVR again…there can be a long period of an unacceptable driver, per underwriting guidelines, driving behind the wheel, and you don’t know it.”
A risk manager pointed to a single case:
“An incident happened in December, but we didn’t learn about it until April.”
With this feedback in mind, our team at SambaSafety focused on closing this gap in the first half of 2026. Here is what shipped.
A Complete, Current View of Every Driver
No single record tells the whole story of a driver’s risk. The signals sit in different systems, from motor vehicle records (MVRs) and Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) inspections to telematics, claims, and training, so a partial view means missed risk or misplaced attention. Four releases this half brought that picture into one place and made it easier to act on.
AI Profile Summary
A new Risk Monitoring capability that generates a driver’s full risk picture from all data sources and presents it as a single, scannable narrative on the driver’s profile. It gives safety and risk teams a clear read of where to focus, supporting day-to-day risk control and loss prevention as well as faster coaching.
AI Analyst (experimental beta)
A conversational assistant, now available as an experimental feature for all customers, that naturally answers questions about fleet risk and surfaces the highest-severity alerts first. It gives lean safety teams a clear starting point at login in place of manual alert triage.
A note on experimental features: Experimental capabilities like AI Analyst are available first through SambaSafety Labs, a dedicated space where we put promising, early-stage innovations into your hands before general release. These features are free to all customers while in experimentation, and customer feedback directly shapes where they go next.
Responsibility-Weighted Accident Scoring
For a more precise Risk Assessment, MVR reports now flag whether a driver was at fault, and the scoring model weighs accidents by responsibility. That sharpens segmentation for underwriters and shows, at a glance, who was responsible, without the manual step of reading through the underlying records.
Broader License Monitoring
Vermont now detects a wider set of status changes, and Oklahoma adds a monthly MVR lookback interval. Both close the activity gap between a pre-hire screen and enrollment, so a record reflects what happened in between.
Compliance You Can Defend
CDLIS Report
Now orderable directly on the platform, in batches or one at a time, with real-time validation that catches errors before submission. The Commercial Driver’s License Information System (CDLIS) confirms whether a driver holds licenses in more than one state and surfaces their prior Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) history, providing fleets and insurers with a single, authoritative view of commercial licensing across states and clear support for the federal one-license requirement.
CSA Daily Event Report Exports
Inspection and crash data now export to CSV, with a custom date range beyond the default 30 days. Compliance teams get the longer reporting windows required by audits and renewals.
More Reliable Records
We continued to refine MVR accuracy across dozens of states, improving how details such as California license status and multi-state records are presented. More precise records provide a stronger foundation for every compliance and underwriting decision.
Train Drivers to Prevent Losses
Accurate records identify risk, and training reduces it. In a 13-year study of a commercial portfolio comprising 25 accounts and more than 5,000 drivers, SambaSafety's continuous monitoring and integrated training avoided $2.5 million in projected claims over 24 months while reducing loss cost per vehicle by 34%.
Learning Paths
Structured training courses you can assign in seconds to improve risk with pre-curated SambaSafety sequences or your own custom-built paths. Learning Paths keep training consistent across an entire driver population, whether the goal is onboarding, remediation, or annual compliance.
Expanded Injury-Prevention Catalog
New Micro-Learning and sub-60-second SafetyShort lessons cover the body mechanics behind non-collision injuries, from safe lifting to the hip hinge, alongside refreshed OSHA and Heavy-Duty courses, including Seat Belt usage in Spanish. These lessons target the strains around the vehicle that drive workers’ compensation and general liability exposure.
Put Your Risk Data to Work Faster
Risk data is most useful when it moves quickly through your workflows and into the systems you already use. Two releases this half made that easier.
Bulk MVR Downloads
Pull many MVRs in a single action, as a combined file or one per driver, all managed from a dedicated Bulk Actions page with status tracking and searchable history. Teams that screen at scale can clear a full batch in a single step.
Risk Assessment API
Activity History and CDLIS reports from the API now return in HTML for rendering, PDF generation, or archiving, and webhook payloads include HMAC signatures so your systems can verify that each event originated from SambaSafety. New endpoints also make subscriptions easier to manage.
What’s Next
More is coming, and CSA is where the next chapter starts, with expanded capabilities arriving later this year to give compliance teams more carrier-level safety signals. We are also expanding telematics capabilities and building Risk Assessment updates that support complete, end-to-end risk workflows for underwriting and employment use cases.
The features mentioned here are live for customers on the applicable packages, and your Customer Success Manager can help you turn them on. To see them live and how they fit your safety or underwriting workflows, speak to one of our experts.
Keep Learning
Build the skills behind a safer, more defensible fleet with the Fleet Risk Management Academy, SambaSafety's peer-reviewed curriculum for safety leaders. Four levels of certification take you from fundamentals to advanced fleet risk strategy, and the Level 100 course is free and open to everyone.
-min.png)