Alex Hawkinson is the Founder and CEO of BrightAI, the place he leads the mission to awaken crucial infrastructure, transitioning operations from reactive to proactive. With over 25 years of expertise in IoT, AI, SaaS, and cloud-based applied sciences, Alex leverages his experience to remodel industries with clever, forward-thinking options that redefine resilience and effectivity.
Earlier than BrightAI, Alex based and led SmartThings, a revolutionary IoT platform that reshaped the linked dwelling panorama, recognized within the tech trade as “father of IOT”. Beneath his steering, SmartThings grew into a world normal, supporting over 1 billion linked units and fostering an ecosystem of 250,000 builders earlier than its acquisition by Samsung in 2014.
BrightAI enhances crucial infrastructure administration by shifting from conventional reactive approaches to proactive, AI-driven operations. Addressing the challenges of growing old methods, the corporate collaborates with house owners and operators to enhance productiveness, optimize capital effectivity, and assist sustainability. Using superior AI and autonomous know-how, BrightAI goals to mitigate dangers, strengthen system resilience, and adapt infrastructure for the long run.
Are you able to share the story behind founding BrightAI? What impressed you to give attention to remodeling crucial industries with Bodily AI?
My journey started in 2012 once I based SmartThings, one of many first IoT platforms to make houses smarter, safer, and extra linked. We aimed to simplify life with units that labored collectively seamlessly. That have opened my eyes to a bigger alternative: a lot of the important providers the world relies upon upon—water, vitality, electrical energy, meals, logistics, transportation, and extra—originate outdoors our houses. The identical rules of connectivity and intelligence may remodel crucial infrastructure within the bodily world. With BrightAI, we’re scaling this imaginative and prescient throughout eight verticals—water, energy, gasoline, transportation, renewable vitality, waste administration, pest management, HVAC, and demanding dwelling providers. We’re bringing the linked dwelling mannequin to the methods that energy our cities and industries, creating a better, extra environment friendly technique to keep our crucial methods.
What does the time period “Bodily AI” imply to you, and why do you assume it’s the pattern to look at for 2025?
To me, “Bodily AI” merges intelligence with the bodily world—bringing AI’s predictive energy to industries going through tangible challenges like growing old infrastructure, useful resource inefficiencies, and labor shortages. It creates a digital layer the place issues like pipes, poles, and equipment turn out to be “sensible” via sensors and AI-driven insights.
Conventional infrastructure administration depends on routine visits and handbook checks, with 50-80% of prices tied to labor and truck rolls. This inefficient and unsustainable method contributes to the $4.5 trillion spent yearly on infrastructure administration. Bodily AI replaces this with real-time monitoring, proactive upkeep, and important price financial savings.
How has your expertise at SmartThings influenced your method to constructing BrightAI and tackling challenges in infrastructure?
SmartThings confirmed me the facility of utilizing information and units to resolve real-world issues at scale, nevertheless it additionally taught me that the important thing to success is simplicity and accessibility. Expertise ought to empower, not intimidate. At BrightAI, we apply this by creating options that seamlessly combine into industries, serving to groups forestall issues moderately than react to them.
SmartThings additionally taught me the worth of long-term considering. Seeing the corporate scale to over a billion linked units after its acquisition by Samsung strengthened the significance of a strong basis, each in tech and person belief.
BrightAI has achieved spectacular income progress whereas in stealth mode. What methods or components do you imagine contributed to this success?
Our income is the results of a centered technique. We prioritized constructing sturdy buyer relationships and really understanding the issues they confronted in order that we may create the correct resolution. That enabled our clients to belief and imagine in our know-how earlier than we even delivered a product. I imagine in attaining this product-market match earlier than in search of exterior funding.
Moreover, it is all about having the correct group, and our collective experience has been instrumental. I introduced the teachings I realized from constructing SmartThings, and our management group additionally brings expertise from constructing autonomous methods at Rivian, enterprise scalability at Microsoft, and AI developments at Meta. We have assembled a bunch uniquely positioned to deal with the challenges of making use of AI to the bodily world at scale, and we owe our success to the group effort.
With over 250,000 sensors deployed, how does BrightAI gather and leverage information to make real-time selections and stop failures in crucial industries?
We now have sensors deployed in additional than 50,000 areas—greater than the entire variety of Starbucks or McDonald’s shops worldwide–that act because the eyes and ears of crucial infrastructure, gathering information from hard-to-reach and high-risk environments. This information flows into our AI-powered platform, Stateful OS, which makes use of multimodal fashions to investigate and predict potential points earlier than they escalate.
Are you able to present examples of how your platform has enabled industries like water and vitality to transition from reactive to proactive administration?
A key instance is our partnership with Azuria Water Options, a frontrunner in pipeline rehabilitation. Azuria confronted hurdles like workforce shortages and the constraints of handbook inspections, which regularly led to inaccurate pipe situation measurements. We retrofitted Azuria’s methods with superior BrightAI sensors, which allow autonomous robots to navigate pipelines, assess their situation, and establish points with minimal human enter. The purpose is to enhance proactive planning by leveraging a digital twin of the water pipelines and improve productiveness and high quality of rehabilitation and administration providers whereas additionally bettering workers retention as the mixing of edge AI and robotics makes these jobs extra thrilling and fewer annoying.
What function does the Stateful OS platform play in making beforehand inaccessible infrastructure information actionable for blue-collar workforces?
We prefer to name it making the invisible seen. Stateful OS compiles real-time information, which is processed via multimodal AI fashions to establish patterns, detect anomalies, and predict potential failures. These insights are delivered on to area groups through intuitive dashboards and alerts, enabling them to behave rapidly and confidently. As a substitute of losing time and vitality on truck rolls, these groups can begin their day by reviewing the info and can then know precisely which points want addressing.
How do BrightAI’s autonomous drones and wearables enhance inspection processes and employee security?
Our drones, geared up with sensors and powered by the Stateful OS platform, can safely and reliably monitor property like energy poles, pipelines, and water methods, even in essentially the most distant and hard-to-access websites. For instance, a single drone flight can examine 50+ poles in comparison with the handful usually coated in a handbook flight. This stage of automation reduces inspection prices by as much as 30x whereas growing productiveness and protection. Our wearables allow hands-free operations and improved decision-making within the area, permitting staff to behave on the pace of machines. Each applied sciences considerably improve employee security by minimizing the necessity for high-risk actions equivalent to climbing poles, getting into confined areas, or working in hazardous environments.
Your platform bridges the “EBITDA chasm” for conventional companies. Are you able to clarify this idea and the way BrightAI achieves it?
The “EBITDA chasm” refers back to the problem of modernizing operations with out sacrificing profitability. BrightAI bridges this hole by driving hyper-efficient operations that cut back each CapEx and OpEx whereas boosting buyer retention and progress. Our platform allows innovation that delivers instant worth, lowers prices, and strengthens market share. With BrightAI, companies can revolutionize their industries whereas steadily growing profitability.
How do you see Bodily AI evolving within the subsequent 5 years, and what function do you envision BrightAI taking part in in that transformation?
Within the subsequent 5 years, Bodily AI will remodel industries by bridging the hole between the bodily and digital worlds. Because it evolves, this know-how will turn out to be extra built-in, intuitive, and widespread, turning static infrastructure into dynamic, self-monitoring methods that resolve issues instantly. Our imaginative and prescient is to drive productiveness, capital effectivity, and sustainability throughout all of our important providers and infrastructure, enabling industries of all sizes to leverage the facility of Bodily AI. This know-how will democratize superior capabilities, making what was as soon as unique to billion-dollar enterprises accessible to industries of all sizes.
Thanks for the good interview, readers who want to be taught extra ought to go to BrightAI.