Retrocausal at Automate LIVE 2026: Empowering Frontline Manufacturing Workers

Retrocausal’s VP of Global Enterprise Sales, Jesse Aust, sat down with Jake Hall (the Manufacturing Millennial) at Automate 2026 in Chicago to talk about how AI is changing the way frontline operators, industrial engineers, and EHS teams work, without requiring anyone to wear a headset or goggle on the floor.

What’s Covered in This Video:

How Retrocausal’s founding team, former HoloLens engineers at Microsoft, moved away from wearable AR to build camera-based AI guidance.
Why predetermined pose estimation lets Assembly Copilot prevent errors in real time, instead of just logging them after the fact.
A simple analogy — paper Lego instructions vs. digital, scannable ones — for what “digital work instructions” really unlock for operators.
How Kaizen Copilot turns a single video recording into time studies, work instructions, floor analysis, P-FMEA, and PMTS/MTM output in minutes instead of weeks.
Why continuous improvement has stayed stuck at “once a year,” and how an always-on Kaizen Copilot can change this.
How Ergo Copilot empowers anyone, not just a trained ergonomics practitioner, to run a full REBA, NIOSH, pinch grip, and hand-force analysis from a smartphone video.
Real ROI numbers from the field, including a customer who cut training time from six weeks to six days.

How Plant Leaders and EHS Teams Use It

Teams on the floor use Retrocausal’s AI solutions to:

Catch deviations from SOPs and SWIs the moment they happen, instead of discovering defects downstream.
Replace week-long, resource-heavy kaizen events with data collected in a single walk of the floor.
Run ergonomics assessments (REBA, NIOSH, pinch grip, hand-force/index) without needing a certified specialist on-site.
Onboard new operators dramatically faster in labor-constrained environments.
Scale a single tool from one line to 50+ facilities in a matter of weeks.

Why It Matters

Manufacturers today are dealing with:

Smaller, less experienced labor pools and longer ramp-up times
Higher variability and configurability at each facility than even five years ago
Legacy systems that don’t talk to each other, slowing down every new initiative
A workforce that still performs the vast majority of tasks manually, where the biggest source of risk and inconsistency lives

Retrocausal’s AI copilots are built to sit on top of existing processes and legacy systems, giving manufacturers a faster path to consistency, safety, and continuous improvement than a multi-year systems overhaul ever could.

Speak to an expert to see our platform in action.

Brandin Watson

Brandin and his team help our customers with setting up the Pathfinder platform and getting up-to-speed on all the features and functionalities, in addition to assisting them with standardizing their processes where needed.

Brandin is a seasoned manufacturing leader, who has spent more than a decade designing and setting up assembly lines in both the US and China, optimizing them, and working with human operators to maximize productivity and quality.

Director of Customer Success

Jesse Aust

Jesse works closely with our marquis customers to understand their needs, and figures out the best solution that immediately adds dollars to their bottom line.

Jesse has two decades of enterprise sales experience. He has held sales leadership roles at pioneering technology startups.

VP of Sales

Andrey Konin

Andrey takes inventions and converts them into innovations. He leads our product engineering team to turn our scientific prototypes into robust customer-facing products.

Andrey co-founded and successfully exited a startup to immigrate to the US. He spent his next eight years building the core data science infrastructure for Amazon’s supply chain planning team, and the CV/ML infrastructure for Microsoft’s HoloLens organization.

Chief Architect

Zeeshan Zia

Zeeshan focuses on delighting our customers by understanding their needs and defining product and strategy to meet and exceed these needs. He works closely with our sales leadership to grow our customer base.

Zeeshan was a scientific leader at Microsoft’s HoloLens division, where he invented AI technologies to assist frontline workers across industries. Earlier, he shipped IoT platforms and visual defect detection software for manufacturers at Siemens and MVTec GmbH.

President

Quoc-Huy Tran, PhD

Huy takes our product roadmap and figures out what’s achievable with today’s AI advances, and what we need to invent to solve our customers’ pain points.

Huy led teams of scientists and engineers at NEC and invented technologies for driver assistance systems that are part of 500,000+ Honda cars. He is an inventor on more than 20 US patents, and his research papers are cited by every lab from MIT, Stanford, and CMU to Apple, Google, and Baidu.

Retrocausal at Automate LIVE 2026: Empowering Frontline Manufacturing Workers

What’s Covered in This Video:

How Plant Leaders and EHS Teams Use It

Why It Matters

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