Samantha Cole at 404 Media provides the background behind this absurd video:

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.

When I first watched the video, I thought it was a bone-dry satire of the kinds of anti-worker, AI-driven systems that VCs and big tech roll out in the name of “efficiencies,” and which exist mainly to induce fear in workers by convincing them they’re disposable yet utterly dependent on the good graces of their company for their continued employment.

But nah—it’s an earnest pitch for yet another exploitative, extractive, VC-backed idea.

The demo doesn’t even purport to solve any issues beyond providing ammo for yelling at workers: no explanation of the supposed inefficiency, no actionable steps for improvement—just “numbers down, must yell now.”

It’s telling that both founders come from families that run factory lines—and it shows in the video, which is overtly owner-centric, with a “management” style that treats the workers as nothing more than cogs to be adjusted for better performance.