AI & DATA STRATEGY not reach those who need to know it. Operations teams are using AI to listen to and summarize shift meetings, capture action items, and automatically email reports to keep everyone informed. USING DATA: For years, the technology industry promoted “Big Data” as a tool to drive efficiency. Unfortunately, gathering large volumes of production data often doesn’t result in actionable insights or analysis; instead, it gathers digital dust in databases. Generative AI models act as junior data analysts. A company builds a data lake of the important data they’ve collected and trains an AI on it. Then, the AI analyzes it in seconds, uncovering trends in scrap, throughput, and downtime reasons, all without any canned reports. The language models can even analyze the data to highlight notable trends. TRAINING: Preparing new team members, and keeping existing staff current with their training, absorbs huge amounts of time from process engineers, management, and the most skilled technical staff, both for creating training material and delivering it. With increased turnover, it’s also frustrating when newly trained employees leave. The psychologist Benjamin Bloom studied different formats of training at the University of Chicago, and in 1984 released a study that found that one-on-one tutorial learning, where each student had a dedicated tutor, increased average performance from the 50th to the 97th percentile. That means that today, manufacturers are leaving huge amounts of staff performance on the table, simply because the productivity returns to one-on-one tutorial training are very high. It is not practical to dedicate a permanent job skills tutor to every employee. But, AI can make this possible, by preparing training plans and content, designing knowledge quizzes, and then giving direct, personalized, and continuous feedback to help team members master their skills. New AI capabilities such as voice-to-voice even allows the AI to have a natural, human-like back and forth conversation to tutor employees in the specific production processes and products at a manufacturer’s plant. DRIVING SYSTEM USAGE: AI is increasingly able to use complex ERP systems on behalf of users, which results in major gains in adoption. Instead of trying to get users to put work orders in, for example, they can verbally tell their AI assistant to do it. If they need to know what materials to stage for an upcoming job, they can just ask their AI, which will pull it from the ERP system. Or if a manufacturer receives purchase orders from customers, AI can review these, extract the necessary information, and put a draft sales order into the system. Generative AI is causing major changes in manufacturers’ digital strategy. To unlock the potential of digital systems, we shouldn’t ask humans to conform to the demands of computers. Instead, we can use AI to conform to the needs of our people. DEREK MOELLER is the co-founder and president of CognitionWorks, a company that provides generative AI transformation for the manufacturing industry using SprocketAI, its AI tribal knowledge and analytics platform. Prior to founding CognitionWorks, he was the president and owner of an injection molding and extrusion company, and before that the founder of a medical media company. He studied economics at Northwestern University. 06 / INSIDE RUBBER / 2025 Issue 1
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy Nzc3ODM=