PHYGITALL at Rio Innovation Week 2026: how AI can impact industrial GDP

In August 2026, Pier Mauá hosted the sixth edition of Rio Innovation Week, Brazil’s largest technology and innovation event. PHYGITALL was there to talk about something that usually stays abstract in presentations on artificial intelligence (AI): what AI does, in practice, for Brazil’s industrial GDP.

Why talk about GDP, not technology

Industry accounts for a significant share of Brazil’s GDP and runs on margins that depend on two things that rarely come up in the same conversation: people protected in the field and lines running without interruption. When an accident halts a facility, the cost to production comes on top of the human cost. When an unbalanced line loses cycle time, the cost doesn’t show up in the safety report, but it does show up in the bottom line.

On stage, PHYGITALL made the case that AI only has an impact on industrial GDP when it starts from the right data, and that on the shop floor, this data originates with the worker.

The data starts on the worker’s chest

That’s why the company started with digital PPE. The Smartbadge logs presence, location, and emergency calls, with no audio or video recording, and sends that information to the platform over a private LoRaWAN network that covers the entire plant, even where cell signal doesn’t reach.

With that field data, the same platform does two jobs. In Safeline, the data becomes area evacuation alerts, an immediate response when someone presses the emergency button, and auditable evidence for risk management. In Pulse, the same data becomes cycle time measurement, line balancing, and support for production scheduling.

AI comes in at that point, turning thousands of readings a day into decisions about where the line is losing time, where risk keeps recurring, and where the operation can grow without compromising the safety of people in the field.

What Brazilian industry stands to gain

A decade of operating in plants such as the Petrobras site in Itaboraí, where more than 5,000 workers are connected, has given PHYGITALL its own view of what separates a pilot from a deployment at scale. Three takeaways from the conversation at Pier Mauá:

• Safety and productivity come from the same data. A company that treats them as separate initiatives either collects the same data twice or doesn’t collect it at all.
• Hazardous (classified) areas cannot be blind spots. The Smartbadge’s Ex certification exists so that the highest-risk areas of the plant are no longer the ones with the least information.
• Hardware, software, and networking developed in Brazil, for the realities of Brazilian operations, make it possible to fit the solution to each plant instead of making the plant adapt.

Watch the session

The full video of PHYGITALL’s session at Rio Innovation Week 2026 is on the company’s YouTube channel.

If there’s a part of your operation where safety and productivity are still managed in separate spreadsheets, it’s worth a conversation.