By: Pulkit Ahuja, Founder and CEO, Proxgy
A few years ago, I spent time on factory floors and construction sites just watching how people actually worked. Not how the process documents said they worked, but how they really did it. A supervisor holding a phone in one hand while trying to inspect a machine with the other. A worker climbing down just to report a fault because his hands were too dirty to use a tablet. A safety officer running between zones because the only way to know what was happening was to be physically present. That is when it hit me. The frontline worker, the person who actually keeps industries running, has been given the least intuitive technology of anyone in the enterprise.
We talk so much about digital transformation in boardrooms, but the people who are actually digging trenches, running assembly lines, and welding steel are still stuck with old devices. That gap is not a small inconvenience. It is one of the biggest blind spots in Indian industry today.
The nature of frontline work has changed faster than the tools meant to support it. Workers today are expected to be more accountable, more data driven and more safety conscious than ever before. Compliance requirements have grown. Machines have become smarter. Supply chains have become tighter and less forgiving of delay. Yet the primary way a frontline worker interacts with all this complexity is still a phone screen, a walkie talkie, or a piece of paper on a clipboard. None of these were built for someone whose hands are occupied, whose environment is loud, and whose next move could be a matter of safety.
Why the Old Tools Don’t Cut It Anymore
This is exactly why handheld devices and screens, as useful as they are in an office, start to break down on a shop floor. You cannot expect a worker operating heavy machinery to look down at a screen every few minutes. You cannot expect someone climbing a tower or working inside a confined space to stop and type a report. And you certainly cannot rely on manual communication systems when seconds matter, whether it is a gas leak, a machine malfunction or a worker in distress. These systems were designed for a slower, less connected industrial world. That world does not exist anymore.
What excites me is that we finally have the technology to close this gap properly. The convergence of AI, IoT and wearable hardware has reached a point where it is genuinely possible to give a frontline worker information the moment they need it, without asking them to change how they work. A helmet that can alert a worker of a hazard before he sees it. A sleeve that lets him control a task without touching a device. An earpiece that connects him instantly to a remote expert instead of him having to leave the site to find one. This is not science fiction. It is engineering that is already being deployed on real factory floors and real construction sites in India.
Wearables as the New Interface
This is where I believe wearables stop being an accessory and start becoming an interface, a genuine layer between the worker, the machine and the enterprise system sitting behind it. Instead of a worker adapting to technology, the technology adapts to the worker. Instead of information sitting in a dashboard somewhere, it reaches the person who needs it, at the moment they need it, hands-free and in real time.
The impact of this shift goes well beyond convenience. When a worker has context-aware intelligence available at all times, situational awareness improves dramatically. Response times to incidents shrink from minutes to seconds. Supervisors get visibility into operations they previously had to physically walk to check. And most importantly, workplace safety improves in a way that policy documents alone can never achieve. In an industry where every incident has a human cost, this matters more than any efficiency metric.
Why India Should Be Building This
I also believe India is uniquely positioned to lead this shift. Our manufacturing and industrial base is expanding rapidly, driven by government push, global supply chain diversification and a genuine appetite among Indian companies to modernise. But this growth cannot rest only on new factories and new machines. It has to be matched by tools that make the people running those factories safer, faster and better equipped. India has an opportunity here that few other countries have, the chance to build industrial technology natively for its own workforce rather than importing solutions designed for a different context altogether.
Too much of enterprise technology has been designed from the top down, for the people managing operations rather than the people carrying them out. I have always felt that the more meaningful opportunity lies in flipping that approach, in building technology that lives with the worker, moves with them, and fits into their environment instead of asking them to adjust to it. The goal should not be another layer of software sitting far from the ground. It should be intelligence that reaches the person doing the work, at the moment they need it, without disrupting how they actually do their job.
I do not think industrial wearables are a passing trend. I think they are the next logical interface for a workforce that has been underserved by technology for far too long. The frontline worker deserves tools that are as intelligent and connected as the systems they support. Building that future is exactly the work we have set out to do.