Why the operating room is ripe for AI, according to Akara

There’s a lot of hype around AI and robots in healthcare, but the problem currently costing hospitals money is operating room coordination. Two to four hours of OR time are lost every day, not because of the operations themselves, but because of everything in between, from manual scheduling and coordination chaos to guesswork about room flow.

Today on TechCrunch Equity podcast, we bring you a conversation that TechCrunch AI editor Russell Brandom had with Conor McGinn, co-founder and CEO of Akara, the startup that recently entered the market Time’s Best Inventions of 2025 and is building what is essentially air traffic control for hospitals using thermal sensors and AI.

Listen to the full episode and hear:

• Why Akara switched from cleaning robots to environmental sensing, and how thermal sensors document operations without privacy concerns

• How NHS research became McGinn’s backdoor into US hospitals

• The real bottleneck holding back medical robotics. (Spoiler: It’s not the robots, it’s the infrastructure)

• Why 40% of the nursing workforce could leave in the next five years, and what that means for automation

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