I was invited to speak on a panel about AI and Manufacturing at CogX this year and so I thought it’d be interesting to share some thoughts from the event.

1. Important process knowledge is held as “Tribal Knowledge” in the minds of production employees around the world.  How do we encode this Tribal Knowledge to make manufacturing efficiency resilient to employee turnover?

2. Technology provides more flexibility to bring manufacturing facilities closer to the end-user.   When this happens in western countries it is sometimes referred to as “re-shoring”, however it is increasingly clear that bringing the manufacturing back is NOT equivalent to bringing the (same) jobs back.  The new jobs are likely to be higher-in-value, but lower-in-volume.

3. The future industrial tech-stack is likely to be increasingly collaborative.  New partnerships will be established.  As software plays a bigger role make vs buy decision becomes very important.  For example, I’d be interested to learn about more examples of industrial software that have been successfully developed in-house by manufacturers.

I was lucky enough to share the panel with these fine gentlemen (check them out):

‍Theo Saville, CEO of CloudNC

‍Amar Hanspal, CEO of Bright Machines