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 rework 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, identified within the tech business as “father of IOT”. Beneath his steering, SmartThings grew into a worldwide commonplace, 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 ageing programs, the corporate collaborates with house owners and operators to enhance productiveness, optimize capital effectivity, and help sustainability. Using superior AI and autonomous expertise, 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 once 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, vitality, electrical energy, meals, logistics, transportation, and extra—originate exterior our properties. The identical rules of connectivity and intelligence may remodel essential infrastructure within the bodily world. With BrightAI, we’re scaling this imaginative and prescient throughout eight verticals—water, energy, fuel, transportation, renewable vitality, waste administration, pest management, HVAC, and demanding dwelling companies. We’re bringing the linked dwelling mannequin to the programs that energy our cities and industries, creating a better, extra environment friendly method to keep our essential programs.
What does the time period “Bodily AI” imply to you, and why do you assume 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 going through tangible challenges like ageing 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 way of 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 price 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 information and gadgets to resolve real-world issues at scale, but it surely 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 quite than react to them.
SmartThings additionally taught me the worth of long-term pondering. Seeing the corporate scale to over a billion linked gadgets after its acquisition by Samsung strengthened the significance of a strong basis, each in tech and consumer belief.
BrightAI has achieved spectacular income development whereas in stealth mode. What methods or elements do you imagine contributed to this success?
Our income is the results of a centered technique. We prioritized constructing sturdy buyer relationships and actually understanding the issues they confronted in order that we may create the fitting resolution. That enabled our clients to belief and imagine in our expertise earlier than we even delivered a product. I imagine in reaching this product-market match earlier than searching for exterior funding.
Moreover, it is all about having the fitting 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 programs at Rivian, enterprise scalability at Microsoft, and AI developments at Meta. We have assembled a bunch 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 acquire and leverage information to make real-time selections and forestall failures in essential industries?
We’ve sensors deployed in additional than 50,000 places—greater than the full variety of Starbucks or McDonald’s shops worldwide–that act because the eyes and ears of essential 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 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 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 restrictions of handbook inspections, which frequently led to inaccurate pipe situation measurements. We retrofitted Azuria’s programs with superior BrightAI sensors, which allow autonomous robots to navigate pipelines, assess their situation, and determine 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 companies whereas additionally enhancing workers retention as the combination of edge AI and robotics makes these jobs extra thrilling and fewer disturbing.
What position 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 by way of multimodal AI fashions to determine patterns, detect anomalies, and predict potential failures. These insights are delivered on to discipline 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 belongings like energy poles, pipelines, and water programs, 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 sometimes coated in a handbook flight. This degree of automation reduces inspection prices by as much as 30x whereas rising 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 equivalent to climbing poles, coming 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 rapid worth, lowers prices, and strengthens market share. With BrightAI, companies can revolutionize their industries whereas steadily rising profitability.
How do you see Bodily AI evolving within the subsequent 5 years, and what position 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 expertise will grow to be extra built-in, intuitive, and widespread, turning static infrastructure into dynamic, self-monitoring programs 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 expertise 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.