Machine safety and telematics infrastructure for heavy plant hire and construction equipment.
A safety device fitted to a machine does not know which machine it is on. Identity is set by hand at installation and maintained by hand thereafter. When a unit is moved, or a machine leaves the fleet, the record and the asset separate. Footage is attributed to the wrong machine, or to no machine at all.
Machine infrastructure is installed permanently. AI compute is not. At present the two are welded together: cameras, cabling, mounts and processing unit are specified, installed and certified as one system. Compute obsoletes in two to three years. The infrastructure around it does not.
When the compute reaches end of life the entire installation is replaced with it, including cabling that was never the constraint. The cost is incurred again in full, on every machine, every cycle.
Moving a kit between machines takes a day to remove and a day to refit. The machine sits through both. So the kit stays where it was first fitted.
A unit fitted to a machine that went out on hire three weeks ago is unavailable to the machine that needs it now. It is on the wrong machine, and there is no economic way to move it.
Prices are high and sold on three-year contracts. A machine on hire goes out for one or two weeks. The commitment and the work do not correspond, so the machine goes out without AI and the people working around it are unprotected.
Main contractors increasingly require human form recognition (HFR) as a condition of tender. Equipping a fleet to that standard has become a capital requirement rather than an operating one, and it is rising. Plant hire companies that cannot fund it are excluded from the work before they bid.
Deaths and serious incidents involving heavy machinery are not falling meaningfully. What the market currently sells is basic shape detection, priced at a premium.
When the machine is sold, the unit fitted to it is stored in a warehouse or sold for pennies. The value written off is not the sensor. It is everything specified, installed and certified around it.
Change supplier and the cameras go in a skip. The recorded history goes with them, because it was never in a format anyone else could read.
Fleet-wide the outcome is consistent: capital that cannot be recovered, compliance records broken at the point of replacement, and no upgrade path that does not begin with removal.
None of this is a detection problem. It is an architecture problem. Every consequence above follows from the same structural decision.
Talvo AI Limited is registered in Scotland, company number SC895816. Registered office: 5 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4AN.