#57 - Dan Hobbs - AI Vision = Guardian Angel: How Dan Hobbs Is Rewiring Safety with AI Vision

Dan Hobbs did not set out to build a safety company. He and his co-founder Ciarán O’Mara started with a question: why do so many workplace fatalities get called freak accidents, when the CCTV footage usually shows the same behaviour patterns happening every day on the same site?Four years later, Protex AI plugs into existing CCTV infrastructure at Fortune 500 sites in 36 countries to surface unsafe behaviours before they become incidents. Computer vision. Privacy-preserving. Not a dashboard, a diagnosis.In this conversation, Mousa and Dan go deeper than the product. They work through the three mental shifts that decide whether an AI-in-safety deployment actually changes anything: surveillance to systems, reactive to proactive, and procurement to partnership. Dan tells the story of walking on stage in front of 300 union members expecting resistance — and the single sentence, from a senior union official, that changed the room. He talks candidly about the scar tissue from building an enterprise AI company: 92 flights in a year, legal councils that feel like Star Trek, and the co-founder dynamic that keeps him from flying too close to the sun.For HSE directors, VPs of safety, and operations leaders trying to figure out what to do with AI before their executive team asks them again.CHAPTERS00:00  Cold open — Guardian Angel, not big brother00:35  Who Dan is, what Protex AI does, where they operate03:00  The founding story — the fatality that wasn’t a freak accident06:00  The privacy reframe — see the forest, not the trees08:00  The union stage and the Guardian Angel moment09:45  ICP, deployment model, and what the first 60 days look like13:00  Kentucky: the first site Dan saw someone nearly die18:30  Build the plane as you’re flying — enterprise AI adoption21:30  Protex Intelligence and the shift from dashboards to questions25:00  Speed of AI versus speed of enterprise28:30  What it is like scaling into the US as an Irish founder32:00  How Dan is doing — 92 flights, yin-yang co-founding, and what lonely at the top actually means34:30  What if everything goes right?Dan Hobbs on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dan-hobbs-258998ab/His company website: protex.aiSend us a message! If you like this podcast episode, subscribe here and follow us on LinkedIn for the latest from our HSE community and guests. Connect with our CEO and host, Mousa, today to stay updated on Safety Heroes, Pixaera, and more. Do you want to be a guest on Safety Heroes, or know someone who would be a great fit? We’d love to hear from you. Send us a message on LinkedIn or email [email protected].