Alex Hawkinson is the Founder and CEO of BrightAI, the place he leads the mission to awaken essential 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 residence panorama, recognized within the tech business as “father of IOT”. Beneath his steerage, SmartThings grew into a world normal, supporting over 1 billion linked gadgets and fostering an ecosystem of 250,000 builders earlier than its acquisition by Samsung in 2014.
BrightAI enhances essential infrastructure administration by shifting from conventional reactive approaches to proactive, AI-driven operations. Addressing the challenges of getting old methods, the corporate collaborates with homeowners 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 longer term.
Are you able to share the story behind founding BrightAI? What impressed you to give attention to remodeling essential industries with Bodily AI?
My journey started in 2012 after I based SmartThings, one of many first IoT platforms to make properties smarter, safer, and extra linked. We aimed to simplify life with gadgets that labored collectively seamlessly. That have opened my eyes to a bigger alternative: many of the important companies the world relies upon upon—water, power, electrical energy, meals, logistics, transportation, and extra—originate exterior our properties. The identical rules of connectivity and intelligence might remodel essential infrastructure within the bodily world. With BrightAI, we’re scaling this imaginative and prescient throughout eight verticals—water, energy, gasoline, transportation, renewable power, waste administration, pest management, HVAC, and important residence companies. We’re bringing the linked residence mannequin to the methods that energy our cities and industries, creating a wiser, extra environment friendly strategy to keep our essential methods.
What does the time period “Bodily AI” imply to you, and why do you suppose it’s the development to look at for 2025?
To me, “Bodily AI” merges intelligence with the bodily world—bringing AI’s predictive energy to industries dealing with tangible challenges like getting old infrastructure, useful resource inefficiencies, and labor shortages. It creates a digital layer the place issues like pipes, poles, and equipment grow to be “good” by 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 strategy contributes to the $4.5 trillion spent yearly on infrastructure administration. Bodily AI replaces this with real-time monitoring, proactive upkeep, and vital value financial savings.
How has your expertise at SmartThings influenced your strategy to constructing BrightAI and tackling challenges in infrastructure?
SmartThings confirmed me the facility of utilizing knowledge and gadgets to unravel 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 slightly than react to them.
SmartThings additionally taught me the worth of long-term considering. Seeing the corporate scale to over a billion linked gadgets after its acquisition by Samsung strengthened the significance of a stable basis, each in tech and consumer belief.
BrightAI has achieved spectacular income development whereas in stealth mode. What methods or components do you imagine contributed to this success?
Our income is the results of a targeted technique. We prioritized constructing sturdy buyer relationships and really understanding the issues they confronted in order that we might create the suitable resolution. That enabled our prospects 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 suitable 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 gaggle uniquely positioned to sort out 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 knowledge to make real-time selections and stop failures in essential industries?
We’ve sensors deployed in additional than 50,000 areas—greater than the overall variety of Starbucks or McDonald’s shops worldwide–that act because the eyes and ears of essential infrastructure, gathering knowledge from hard-to-reach and high-risk environments. This knowledge flows into our AI-powered platform, Stateful OS, which makes use of multimodal fashions to research and predict potential points earlier than they escalate.
Are you able to present examples of how your platform has enabled industries like water and power to transition from reactive to proactive administration?
A key instance is our partnership with Azuria Water Options, a pacesetter in pipeline rehabilitation. Azuria confronted hurdles like workforce shortages and the restrictions 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 objective is to enhance proactive planning by leveraging a digital twin of the water pipelines and improve productiveness and high quality of rehabilitation and administration companies whereas additionally bettering employees retention as the combination of edge AI and robotics makes these jobs extra thrilling and fewer disturbing.
What function does the Stateful OS platform play in making beforehand inaccessible infrastructure knowledge actionable for blue-collar workforces?
We prefer to name it making the invisible seen. Stateful OS compiles real-time knowledge, which is processed by multimodal AI fashions to establish patterns, detect anomalies, and predict potential failures. These insights are delivered on to discipline groups by way of intuitive dashboards and alerts, enabling them to behave rapidly and confidently. As an alternative of losing time and power 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, outfitted with sensors and powered by the Stateful OS platform, can safely and reliably monitor property like energy poles, pipelines, and water methods, even in probably 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 degree 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 discipline, permitting employees to behave on the velocity of machines. Each applied sciences considerably improve employee security by minimizing the necessity for high-risk actions akin 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 development. Our platform allows innovation that delivers fast 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 enjoying 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 grow to be extra built-in, intuitive, and widespread, turning static infrastructure into dynamic, self-monitoring methods that remedy issues instantly. Our imaginative and prescient is to drive productiveness, capital effectivity, and sustainability throughout all of our important companies 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 nice interview, readers who want to be taught extra ought to go to BrightAI.
