Safer, Smarter Construction Sites with Edge AI and Caterpillar Autonomous Machines - Ep. 285

Welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm Noah Kravitz. With me today is Brandon Hootman. Brandon is vice president of data and artificial intelligence at Caterpillar, and, we're speaking just after CES week twenty twenty six. Happy New Year, everybody. It's a big week for Caterpillar, so we're going to get into all the exciting stuff that's been going on, this week, but leading up to it, certainly. But before we do that, Brandon, welcome to the pod. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. No. Awesome to be with you. Big week for Caterpillar. We are excited to, to be on stage at CES and also excited to, to announce some things in, in partnership with NVIDIA. Fantastic. We'll get into all that in a second. But first, if you would, can you tell us a little bit about Caterpillar? I I would think most people listening know the brand, have seen your machines, have seen the logo. But if you can give us a little bit of background about the company and then also maybe a little bit about your role, just kind of to set up the conversation. Be happy to, Noah. So 2025 was a big year for Caterpillar. We celebrated our 100 year anniversary. So we've Amazing. Been, helping build a better world, in multiple areas for the past century and really proud of that. And, you know, I think a lot of the audience would recognize Caterpillar from just the drives down the interstate and you see our machines doing the work and, you know, that's one area of our business, but we've also got a pretty significant footprint in other areas that individuals may not know about. We do a lot of work in in heavy mining and then we also do a significant amount of work in energy and power generation too, which with AI now really taking off, as you can imagine, has been a been a huge part of our business. We're really excited by that. Yeah. For sure. And so what about your role? How how long have you been at Caterpillar? If you want, you know, a little bit of backstory about you landed here, but then maybe you can just kinda describe what, what you do as VP of AI and data. Yeah. Yeah. Will do. Will do. So I'm a software engineer by by education and by most of most of my time in the workforce. I've been with Caterpillar for twenty seven years, and it doesn't doesn't really feel like that, but I've been here now for twenty seven years. And over the course of of my twenty seven years, while it feels like, you know, know, you could look at that and say, well, you've been been in one spot for quite a while. Like, I probably had six or seven different careers over the the course of that twenty seven years, so it's been been pretty cool to do. …