AI Adoption is up with Industrial Orgs

I was just reading a a Gartner report on trends in AI and many of the comments struck a cord.

Gartner makes the point that "During the pandemic, for example, AI came to the rescue. Chatbots helped answer the flood of pandemic-related questions, computer vision helped maintain social distancing and machine learning models were indispensable for modeling the effects of reopening economies."

With my industrial/ manufacturing leaning, I can absolutely say the maturing of purpose built AI applications is driving a number of significant changes in manufacturing. In particular three trends/ high value uses I am seeing adopted at scale as I are addressing the human capital challenges faced by leaders in the industrial markets:

1. Attracting a new workforce that has grown up on technology that guides their decisions. Just last week I was reading a job description from one of my clients in the packaging industries that included in requirements: "you must like using technology such tablets, VR head sets and smart phones throughout your day".

1A. Finding enough new quality workers to replace the retiring workforce. It will not be possible to hire the right experience to replace your "gray beards" but what you can do is hire for potential. Hire people with the right aptitude and leverage AI to assess and personalize the on-boarding and learning of workers to minimize their time to proficiency. Gartner's calling out how Chatbots came to the rescue during Covid is a trend I am seeing in manufacturing. One client highlighted how their work conditions are in turmoil as they deal with workers out with Covid, travel restrictions limited teams from traveling and early retirements decreasing the resources available to work. Using AI chatbots they have been able to guide and up-skill their field teams on how to accomplish their work (both planned an opportunistic) right, the first time out.

2. Knowledge leaking out of your walls as the existing work force retires. Talking with a client recently, he said "we have 300 Tommies on our factory floors." For any of your not getting the reference (as I didnt), explaining further he said "they are all like the The Pinball Wizard...Without being able to see, they inherently know how to do their jobs but they wouldn't have the ability to explain to others how they do what they do". In order to capture this knowledge, this automotive executive adopted an AI based connected worker technology to capture all steps and procedures of his teams' work activities. The output of this platform was analysis of the large amounts of data coming from their moist experienced workers to understand and document the procedures that led to the best business outcomes. These insights have been driving new best practice procedures across thousands of existing workers and helping to get new workers up to speed more quickly.

I am excited to see AI continue its adoption with industrial through leaders as a lever for driving competitive advantage and i will continue to share what I see coming down the pipe but please feel free to contribute your thoughts and trends you are seeing.