In a nondescript building close to downtown Chicago, Marc Gyongyosi and the small but growing crew of IFM/Onetrack.AI have one principle that rules them all: think simple. The words are written in simple font on a sheet of paper that’s stuck to a rear upstairs wall of their industrial two-story workspace. What they’re doing here with artificial intelligence, however, isn’t simple at all.

Sitting at his cluttered desk, located near an oft-used ping-pong table and prototypes of drones from his college days suspended overhead, Gyongyosi pulls up grainy video footage of a forklift driver operating his vehicle in a warehouse. It was captured from overhead courtesy of a Onetrack.AI “forklift vision system.”