The Connected News Podcast · Business Post

The Connected AI Podcast: How AI can aid workplace safety

·45 min·1 clip

Charlie Taylor and Elaine Burke start by working through the latest AI pricing headlines. Elaine pushes back on the idea that a pricey chatbot should automatically count as a cost saver. The episode sets $2,000 agents, a $10,000 software developer agent, and a $20,000 PhD-level assistant in the same frame. That keeps the discussion grounded before the guest even arrives. Dan Hobbs then joins to talk about Protex AI. He describes the company as a computer vision business focused on safety and operations in factories and warehouses. The basic idea is straightforward: use cameras and AI to identify patterns that can lead to accidents, then stop those patterns before anything goes wrong. The show treats that as a much bigger AI story than the usual chat interface. Dan says most people think about AI through ChatGPT or generative tools, but the field is far broader than that. The episode spends real time in that wider space. He explains computer vision as teaching cameras to understand context and act on it. In Protex’s case, that means spotting unsafe situations before they become incidents. The founders’ backstory comes next. Dan and his co-founder Ciaran had not worked in safety or operations before. Ciaran was doing a PhD in computer vision, while Dan had recently sold his first company and was finishing an earn-out. They met at the Young Scientist exhibition years earlier, and that relationship becomes part of the origin story the show returns to with some affection. The episode makes it clear the two had known each other long before the company existed. During covid, they tried to work out where computer vision might actually be useful. They were having pints near the RDS and talking through possible uses. They kicked around a few ideas, including shopping statistics. That line of thought did not hold up for long. They wanted something that could scale and still matter in the real world. The goal was not just technical novelty. They wanted an idea that would sound good if they told it to someone at the pub. That test weeds out a lot of weak startup ideas very quickly. Drones came up as a possible direction. The conversation even touches on the idea of a drone guard dog. The show uses that detour to show the founders searching for a use case with obvious value instead of forcing the technology into whatever trend was nearest. It adds personality without losing the thread. As the chat goes on, the safety use case keeps pulling the episode back to reality. Factories and warehouses are not abstract settings. They are places where patterns matter, small mistakes can compound, and prevention is worth more than cleverness. The tone stays brisk and conversational throughout. It sounds like people who know the AI market well but do not feel the need to flatter it. The result is a useful contrast between hype-driven pricing talk and a concrete product aimed at reducing risk on the ground. The episode never pretends those two worlds are the same.

As heard by us

A practical AI conversation that favors workplace safety and deployment over hype.

The piece begins with a dispute over OpenAI's reported pricing, then moves into a conversation with Dan Hobbs of Protex AI, a promising startup from Ireland that recently raised 36 million from backers.

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Want AI beyond chatbots and into workplace safety?

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