Prenten AI and TPM Solutions bring autonomous asset inspection to Southeast Asia’s infrastructure build-out

Southeast Asia needs somewhere between $184 billion and $210 billion a year in infrastructure investment, according to the Asian Development Bank, to keep pace with growth and climate resilience needs. Rail, energy, water and transport projects are underway across the region at a rate that’s already testing the supply of skilled people available to inspect, verify and document that work as it happens. It’s the same problem Australia is dealing with domestically, just earlier and at a larger scale. 

Prenten AI has partnered with TPM Solutions LLC to bring autonomous site inspection into the region. The partnership combines TPM Solutions’ operational expertise with Prenten AI’s software, which lets tracked, wheeled, quadruped and future humanoid robots inspect assets and sites on their own. For proponents and contractors bidding on infrastructure work in the region, it’s a way to build a verified, timestamped inspection record into a project from day one, not bolt one on after the fact. 

Prenten AI’s software lets a robot walk a site or a facility on its own, understand what it’s looking at, and produce a consistent record of what it found. That record can verify construction progress against plans, confirm an asset is performing as it should, or flag a deviation the moment it appears, in fixed industrial assets and live sites alike, including hazardous environments a person shouldn’t have to enter as often as the job requires. 

Prenten AI’s Chief Sales Officer, Paul Rebelo, said the platform wasn’t built for one sector. “Construction, infrastructure, utilities, industrial plant, they all have the same underlying problem: not enough people to check everything as often as it should be checked. TPM Solutions gives us the reach to take that capability into new markets, starting with Southeast Asia,” Rebelo said. David Turner, Managing Director of TPM Solutions said the partnership responds to a gap he sees widening across the region. “As infrastructure investment accelerates across Southeast Asia, the ability to verify what’s actually happening on site, consistently and without relying on a person being there every time, is going to matter more each year,” Turner said. 

The partnership sits alongside a similar arrangement closer to home. Prenten AI also works with Anthony Mundine and Gosh Daher’s MGM Australia, an Indigenous-owned business, to bring the same autonomous inspection service to MGM’s construction and infrastructure clients here. Where a robot operator is needed on site, MGM trains and supplies an Indigenous operator to do the job.