A venture capital-backed “AI performance monitoring system for factory workers” is proposing what appears to be dehumanizing surveillance of factories, where machine vision tracks workers’ hand movements and output so a boss can look at graphs and yell at them about efficiency.
In a launch video demoing the product, Baid and Mohta put on a skit showing how Optifye.ai would be used by factory bosses.
The YC deleted video for sweatshop startup Optifye pic.twitter.com/vCJvm2HTce
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“Ugh, it’s workspace 17. Workspace 17 is the bottleneck. The worst performing workspace here,” one of the bosses says, while watching a video of a man making clothing in a factory. “Hey number 17, what’s going on man? You are in red,” he says. “I have been working all day,” the person playing the worker says. “Working all day?” the line boss replies. “You haven’t hit your hourly output even once today. And you have 11.4% efficiency, this is really bad!”
“It’s just been a rough day,” the “worker” replies. “Rough day?” the boss says, looking at a calendar full of red days. “More like a rough month.”
Optifye.ai, launched by Duke University computer science students Vivaan Baid and Kushal Mohta, is backed by Y Combinator, according to the company’s site. On their Y Combinator company profile, they write that both of their families run manufacturing plants, where they’ve been exposed to factory working conditions since they were children. “I've been around assembly lines for as long as I can remember,” Baid wrote.
Mohta wrote, “My family also runs several manufacturing plants in various industries, which has given me unrestricted access to assembly lines since I was 15.”
They hope to sell cameras to factory owners to use on assembly lines, their website says, and “use computer vision to tell supervisors who's working and who's not in real-time.”
Y Combinator deleted its recent Linkedin and X posts congratulating the company on launching.
On their Y Combinator profile, Baid and Mohta outline who gets what out of installing micromanaging AI surveillance on assembly lines. Owners gets “accurate real-time factory, line, and worker productivity metrics,” production heads get “line-wise and worker-wise metrics,” shopfloor supervisors get to “identify who/what is causing inefficiency in the line and fix the problem on the go.” For the workers? They get the tantalizing benefit of being “held accountable for good or bad performance.”
Worker surveillance is already happening across industries. After the rise of remote work, companies started tracking workers’ productivity based on mouse movements, so workers started using “mouse jigglers” so they could walk away from their computers and use the bathroom in peace. In Amazon warehouses, workers are tracked and punished for not meeting grueling expectations and bathroom breaks are timed, resulting in more injuries and less safe working conditions. Optifye.ai’s approach and pitch, however, stands out because of the way its founders seem to embrace cruelty to workers in the name of productivity.
Optifye.ai and Y Combinator did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
