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The manufacturing industry is as diverse as the number of products in the market.
There’s always a never-ending journey to do things better. And one of the key “things” is quality control and safety-critical inspections.
Inspections are quite labour-intense and expensive, which makes them very unscalable. The way companies have gotten around this so far is by sampling a tiny few of the products and look for defects, and then extrapolate from there.
But with AI, there’s a better way. Humans don’t scale, but AI does.
Which brings me to my guest Christian Els, the CEO of Sentin AI, which provides software for AI-powered inspections in manufacturing.
But manufacturing is often considered one of the most conservative, slow-moving industries (factories are expensive and don’t change processes easily). There’s all this buzzword bingo about “industry 4.0” and smart connected factories, but very little light on how you actually connect and upgrade factories.
In this episode we drop the buzzwords, discuss the current REALITY of smart factories, and also share honest, no-BS lessons from the process of transforming them:
00:30 — Most powerful use cases for visual inspections with AI, and why it’s needed
13:10 — In-depth breakdown of the process of bringing AI to a factory
23:20 — Challenges in convincing conservative customers that AI is a journey
26:30 — Cultural differences between old-school engineers and the new cloud culture
31:00 — Why Sentin doesn’t believe in 100% self-serve AI tools for customers
33:00 — Current state of IT systems in most factories, from Christian’s perspective
40:00 — Hard-earned lessons from selling AI transformation
46:00 — Navigating the complex competitive landscape for AI and computer vision in manufacturing
56:00 — Christian’s view of predictive maintenance solutions and their claims
(Ethics Policy: These opinions are 100% my own as an independent observer and educator. I don’t own stock in guests’ companies or their competitors, nor do I get paid by them in any form for any reason at the time of publishing, unless specifically stated. Episodes are also not intended to be an automatic endorsement of any company or its products and services.)
