Protex AI

“transformative safety intelligence platform”

Pros

Across my 12 years at 3M, Protex AI has easily been the strongest vendor partnership I've worked with. It has completely changed the way we handle safety, moving us away from a reactive, after the fact model into a proactive, data driven approach. Rather than waiting for incidents to happen and then looking into them, it uses AI with our existing CCTV setup to detect risks in real time. That change alone has been a huge win for both our safety results and the culture around safety. On the product side, the platform is extremely well built. Bringing new sites online, including camera integration and rule setup, is surprisingly easy to use and we've run into almost no bugs. That's worth calling out because the maturity of the platform feels far ahead of other companies at a similar stage. The main interface, whether it's dashboards event reviews or investigation tools, is clean, fast and designed in a way that both safety teams and operations staff can start using right away without much friction. Protex Intelligence also deserves special mention. It's honestly difficult to fully capture how useful this analytics tool is. At a basic level, it helps us track trends and plant performance but the real strength is in how interactive and investigative it is. We automatically create weekly executive summaries that surface the biggest safety risks across all facilities which gives leadership something actionable to respond to. On a deeper level, our engineering teams use Intelligence to explore very specific issues. In one example, an ergonomics engineer compared work centers across several plants, found best practices in the top performing areas and used those insights to improve weaker locations. That kind of cross facility visibility just wasn't available to us before. Beyond the software itself, the team itself has been exceptional. From the pilot stage all the way through enterprise rollout, they've been responsive, knowledgeable and genuinely committed to helping us succeed. I especially want to mention their technical team which consistently works through real operational challenges with us and keeps delivering thoughtful solutions that improve over time. Overall, every interaction I've had with both the platform and the people behind it has left me impressed.

Cons

The toughest part of rolling this out across the company has been uneven adoption between our internal sites. The platform delivers valuable data on safety risks throughout our facilities and helps turn that information into practical insights. That said, each facility still has to take ownership of reducing at risk events and making safety improvements happen. Some sites do that very effectively, while others move much more slowly. If a location isn't truly committed to improving its safety culture, there's only so much this platform can do on its own.

“smart safety insights”

Pros

It has been a really positive experience so far especially because we don't need much extra hardware and can make use of the security cameras we already have in place. The dashboard is especially valuable, with tools like heat maps and thermal views that help us spot higher risk areas quickly. There's also a map that highlights where powered industrial trucks and pedestrians cross paths which makes it easier to identify locations that may need more than basic coaching. Another part I appreciate is the AI feature that works a bit like a chatbot, letting different users customize reports to their own needs with AI driven insights and pull meaningful information faster. The initial setup went very well and clearly demonstrated feasibility which created more opportunities to reduce injuries. On top of that the support team is responsive forward thinking and aligned with our people first mindset around keeping everyone safe.

Cons

One part that has been a little challenging is the camera selection process after a site is identified. Reviewing camera views can take a lot of time especially when a single work area has anywhere from 100 to 300 camera feeds. Since we have to choose only a portion of those cameras to keep the Protex program cost effective, that step becomes very time consuming. Because of that, rolling the system out broadly across multiple sites feels less practical especially since selecting cameras for the initial pilot locations was already difficult.