I sat down with Balaji D Loganathan, founder of Spritle Software and SeeWise.AI for a podcast last week.
I have known Balaji for a few years through Stanford Seed. AI for him was never a hype trade. It started with something personal.
Years ago, a relative lost his leg in a factory accident. Balaji never forgot the question it left behind:Â Why are factory accidents so common, and why is no one doing anything about them?
That became SeeWise.
The hard part started after the product was built. Indian factories rarely release budgets for safety alone. They pay for productivity. So the team rebuilt the pitch around man, machine, method, and material, with safety as a second-order benefit.
Weighbridge cycle times, furnace performance, and PPE adherence are all monitored in real time. It also catches theft, quality drops, and process leakages.
A few things from the conversation that stood out:
📍 Their first paying client did not come from the CEO or CIO. It came from a worker who pushed the idea up to his shop floor manager.
📍 Workers initially resisted the cameras. HR fixed it by building a recognition system around the data the AI was already collecting.
📍 The AI once exposed an organised goods leakage at a customer's dispatch point. The customer did not act on it. The relationship went cold, and they eventually walked away.
A working model is the cheap part of any factory AI project. The expensive part is a leadership team willing to act on what it shows them.
If you are evaluating AI for operations in 2026, this episode is worth a listen.
Link: https://lnkd.in/gVEC8w6J