AI, the light bulb of the 21st century | Interview w/ Sandeep Pandya | Founder of Everguard

AI will cause a paradigm shift in several areas of human life in the next decade. Everguard is already using it to improve industry workers’ safety and to provide real-time data about large, complex and dangerous environments. Founder Sandeep Pandya explains the profound impact of AI and how far we have come since the 70’s […]

AI will cause a paradigm shift in several areas of human life in the next decade. Everguard is already using it to improve industry workers’ safety and to provide real-time data about large, complex and dangerous environments. Founder Sandeep Pandya explains the profound impact of AI and how far we have come since the 70’s – even if it doesn’t look like that.

Sandeep Pandya likes to live at the edge. That is where the activity is happening and where machines interact with humans. His company, Everguard, has built a complex system using edge computing in order to monitor industrial environments. This technology has a double purpose of providing real-time alerts and collecting valuable data that management can use to streamline and optimize the workflow.

Dangerous work environments are still responsible for more than 5,000 deaths every year. While it is not feasible to install cameras and sensors everywhere in a coil yard or steel factory, covering the incident hotspots and giving workers wearables that both track their movement and warn them in a fraction of a second already goes a long way towards better safety at the workplace. From a business point of view, caring about safety not only reduces liability, it also facilitates recruiting and retention, and earns points with business partners. 

AI as a concept has been around for several decades, but until recently, the hardware could not keep up with the computing needs of such a system. With the advent of smartphones and the booming gaming industry, the processing power of computers has increased to a point where it is easy and cheap to get the computing power needed for machine learning. The quality of the data input is still a limiting factor, as is people’s reluctance to be constantly monitored, but AI is a tool for society that will naturally grow on the breeding ground that today’s virtual world is.

Mentions

Everguard’s website: www.everguard.ai

Sandeep on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandeeppandyasd/

Key takeaways

why using generally available components is a better choice than building custom hardwarehow collected data can help remap the flow at an industrial site to make it more efficient and safer at the same timehow safety can impact recruitment and retention and increase bottom linewhy the government should just enable and support innovation instead of trying to be at the forefront