Despite all the hype around AI and robots in the medical field, the issue that’s really costing hospitals today is operating room coordination. Two to four hours of surgical time are lost each day. This isn’t the fault of the surgery itself, but everything in between, from manual scheduling and coordination confusion to speculation about room swaps.
Today on TechCrunch’s Equity Podcast, we bring you a conversation between TechCrunch AI Editor Russell Brandom and Akara Co-Founder and CEO Conor McGinn. Akara, recently named Time magazine’s Best Inventions of 2025, is a startup that uses thermal sensors and AI to essentially build air traffic control for hospitals.
Listen to the full episode and hear what’s next.
Why Akara pivoted from cleaning robots to environmental sensing and how thermal sensors record surgeries without privacy concerns How NHS review became McGinn’s backdoor into US hospitals The real bottlenecks holding back medical robots. (Spoiler: It’s not robots, it’s infrastructure.) Why 40% of the nursing workforce could retire in the next five years and what that means for automation
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