VitVio, a London startup, is putting AI-equipped cameras inside the operating theatre of a Polish public hospital.
The company's Vetro camera and sensor platform is going live at University Clinical Centre in Gdańsk, the first Polish hospital to adopt it. Vetro logs activity inside the operating room, the kind of system the EU's AI Act would normally classify as high-risk worker monitoring software. That classification, and the stricter compliance rules that come with it, has been delayed until December 2027. VitVio is moving into one of the most sensitive settings imaginable while that regulatory clock is paused.
Operating theatres are exactly where monitoring tech is most useful and most fraught: errors are costly, but so is turning surgeons and nurses into subjects of constant surveillance. The AI Act delay means VitVio and any competitor doing similar work get a multi-year head start building products and gathering data before the rules meant to govern worker monitoring AI actually bite.
Call it a grace period or a loophole. Either way, Polish operating room staff are the ones working under cameras while regulators decide what that's supposed to mean.