In 2015, security analyst and former garda sergeant Sheelagh Brady began advising corporates on their duty of care obligations to employees travelling for work.
Most of the time things go smoothly, but if a problem arises and escalates, those working alone or in remote or hostile regions become vulnerable.
Brady’s advice was based on personal experience. She had worked in a number of war zones and post-conflict countries and had been through an emergency evacuation from Libya, where poor real-time information had made it difficult to plan a safe exit.
“With business travellers, we’re talking about risk incidents from storms and travel disruption to fires, mass casualties and up to and including kidnapping and terrorist incidents,” says Brady, whose company launched the S-Man security management app for business travellers in 2019.
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However, the app was hardly out of the blocks when Covid changed the world beyond recognition. Business travel all but ceased, and Brady stepped back to regroup.
She took time out to finish a PhD in criminology and terrorism studies at DCU and watched with interest as the potential of AI and large language learning models became more apparent.
The S-Man app had been the best of breed when it was launched, but it was “only” an app.
With AI and machine learning, however, Brady had the building blocks to create a much more sophisticated product. This led to the creation of Kowroo, an AI-driven people risk management platform designed to help organisations support employees when travelling or operating in uncertain environments.
“Traditional travel risk management systems tend to focus on incidents, alerts, tracking, and country-level advice rather than on people. But risk is often far more personal and contextual than that,” Brady says.
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“Two people can experience the same location very differently depending on factors such as time of day, familiarity with the environment, gender, nationality, or unfolding local events. We wanted to build something that reflected how risk is actually experienced by individuals as it happens.
“Kowroo was built to answer one simple question: ‘Am I safe here, right now?’
“By combining real-time intelligence with human-experienced risk and perception data, we can provide more personalised and actionable risk assessments.
“We also incorporate perception-of-safety insights, recognising that how safe someone feels can significantly influence behaviour, confidence, decision-making and wellbeing regardless of whether a formal security incident has occurred or not.”
Large employers could have hundreds of employees away on company business at any one time, each with potential risk exposure.
Employers have a duty of care to these staff – and if something goes wrong, the consequences can be significant. “On average, it costs over €3.5 million in legal, operational, and reputational fallout, and that is where there are no injuries,” Brady says.
Conflict, civil unrest, climate events, cyber disruption and geopolitical tensions are no longer isolated incidents – they are becoming part of the operating environment for many organisations
“For organisations, supporting employees in uncertain environments is increasingly tied not just to safety and duty of care, but also to wellbeing, productivity and resilience. In our view the sector is moving beyond broad travel alerts towards more personalised, real-time support which our platform can provide.”
The two sides to the Kowroo platform are the corporate dashboard and the individual app whirring away in the background.
It is constantly updating its information, but users only get alerts relevant to them. The data used by the platform is drawn from multiple international sources and covers factors such as weather, global incidents and travel disruptions.
“Our platform ingests thousands of live data points every second to trigger early alerts, often predicting an incident before it happens,” Brady says.
“For example, Dublin was assumed to be a safe city until it wasn’t – we all remember the riots. But not everyone was impacted the same way by the riots, and that’s the point. Kowroo understands that risk isn’t equal.
“We are entering a period where geopolitics, workforce mobility, AI, and real-time data are converging in a way that is fundamentally reshaping how organisations think about safety, resilience, and operational risk.
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“Over the last decade, organisations have become increasingly global, and the world has become significantly more volatile and unpredictable. Conflict, civil unrest, climate events, cyber disruption and geopolitical tensions are no longer isolated incidents – they are becoming part of the operating environment for many organisations.
“What has also changed is the pace at which uncertainty spreads. People are no longer affected only by events happening directly around them. Continuous exposure to global crises through news and social media is influencing how people feel, even thousands of miles away from an incident. We’re also dealing with the fallout from fake news, disinformation and incidents portrayed as true when they are not.”
Kowroo has been developed with an investment of approximately €1.6 million between research support, private equity, early-stage funding and commercialisation and HPSU backing from Enterprise Ireland.
Roughly €1 million was spent building out the company’s proprietary risk modeller in conjunction with DCU. The company is based in Kildare and employs seven people, mainly in IT roles.
Kowroo is likely to gain most traction with large corporates, but Brady wants the platform to be available to businesses of all sizes. The subscription fee will therefore be based on the number of employees using the platform.
Further down the line Kowroo will roll out more applications of its technology, including a B2C option for private travellers and a bolt-on product for corporate insurers. It is also looking at aggregating and selling anonymised data to mapping companies to highlight security risks on travel routes.
For now, however, Kowroo is focused on finishing out a number of pilots with a view to a full commercial launch in September.
