National Roots Day – A History of Manufacturing Software Innovation

Prior to Augmentir, our founding team was involved in founding Wonderware Software in 1987, Lighthammer in 1997, and ThingWorx in 2008. In 2017, we recognized that the technology and market forces were aligned yet again, for a fourth industrial software revolution. A revolution that focused on increasing the productivity and quality of processes involving front-line workers.

National Roots Day is celebrated on December 23rd as a chance to celebrate one’s history, heritage, and ancestry. It’s often said that a combination of each person on one’s family tree helps to shape them into the person they are today.

At Augmentir, we agree that the past is important, and it has definitely shaped Augmentir into the company it is today. This year, we’re using National Roots Day to reflect on our history and how Augmentir came to be the modern Connected Worker platform that you use and trust today. The Augmentir founding team, Russ Fadel, Phil Huber, and Lawrence Fan, has been at the forefront of the most important software technology revolutions. Prior to Augmentir, our founding team was involved in founding Wonderware Software in 1987, Lighthammer in 1997, and ThingWorx in 2008. 

In 2017, the founders of Augmenir recognized that the technology and market forces were aligned yet again, for a fourth industrial software revolution. A revolution that focused on increasing the productivity and quality of processes involving front-line workers. 

Transforming How Machines Run

In 1987, Wonderware transformed how machines run, with the introduction and mass commercialization of Human-Machine Interface software. Wonderware enabled the first software-based industrial revolution and is still in evidence today by Wonderware’s continued leadership position.

Revolutionizing the Factory Floor

In 1997, Lighthammer transformed manufacturing yet again with the introduction of the first Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence platform. Lighthammer revolutionized the factory floor by bringing both real-time intelligence and live synchronization with the ERP software layer. This enabled the second software-based industrial revolution and is still evidenced today by the ubiquity of this software (currently under the SAP MII brand).

Catalyzing the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)

In 2008, ThingWorx catalyzed the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with the introduction of the first application platform for IIoT. ThingWorx transformed both manufacturing and service, becoming synonymous with Industrie 4.0/Brilliant factory, and Connected Service. This enabled the 3rd software-based industrial revolution and is still evidenced today by the ubiquity of IIoT software and the market leadership of PTC’s ThingWorx brand.

 

Today, at Augmentir, we are continuing this trend of bringing innovative software into the manufacturing sector by focusing on the people that make up such an integral part of the digital transformation equation.

Remote Expert in Field Service – Treating the Cause not the Symptom

As a leader in the connected worker software market, we have experienced the highs and the lows that the pandemic has brought to the industrial frontline worker market. One area that stands out in particular is the equipment field service space. Equipment OEMs typically support the installation, startup, maintenance, and repair of their products through […]

As a leader in the connected worker software market, we have experienced the highs and the lows that the pandemic has brought to the industrial frontline worker market. One area that stands out in particular is the equipment field service space. Equipment OEMs typically support the installation, startup, maintenance, and repair of their products through some combination of a direct service force, a dealer service network, or their customers. This created a real problem when the COVID pandemic spread since the “instructions” available to support these services were designed for technicians who already knew how to perform the work, and much of the equipment was highly sophisticated requiring visits to the customer site.  OEMs had to quickly find a way to project some type of virtual presence or ‘remote expert’ solution, to mimic being on-site as closely as possible. 

This led to a rush to implement either industrial remote expert tools, enterprise collaboration products like Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams, or consumer products like FaceTime to support field service activities.

While these solutions have been good at providing a short-term band-aid to relieve the symptom, they don’t really address the underlying problem – the lack of rich, interactive workflows that are able to guide technicians with a wide range of skills to perform these tasks safely, correctly, and at an acceptable level of productivity. It’s a similar scenario to taking aspirin to treat a fever from an infection – aspirin may provide short-term relief, but ultimately it masks the presence and reduces the urgency to treat the underlying cause. Without looking forward and taking the next step in the connected worker journey, OEM’s will forever be required to provide 100%, synchronous, live support to make sure these tasks are done correctly and that customers are satisfied.

Achieving Digital Maturity to Reduce Support Costs and Improve Customer Satisfaction 

At Augmentir, we see “Digitally Mature” organizations as those that are continually moving forward on the digital continuum and have the ability to drive continuous improvement through the adoption of tools that help digitally connect their workforce. 

For equipment OEMs, we see digital maturity happening over four stages of the connected worker journey: 

Connected Worker Journey in Field Service

Step 1 – Remote Expert and Assistance

Industrial AR-based remote assistance and remote expert solutions that provide worker guidance and support are a simple first step in the connected worker journey. Designed to be used by field service technicians or customers, these industrial solutions allow companies to provide remote expert support via rich interactive (chat, voice, video) mediums to field techs or customers to solve an immediate need.

Step 2 – Augmented, Guided Instructions 

With a connected workforce, equipment OEMs can drive greater efficiency by digitizing paper-based work instructions and maintenance/repair procedures. Digital work instructions help intelligently guide technicians (or customers) of all skill levels to complete these tasks independently and correctly. 

In this field service scenario, remote expert and assistance plays a supporting role (as it should) to ensure customer satisfaction. Customers have higher satisfaction rates because the work is done on their time schedule and OEMs see a reduction in their direct support costs.  

Step 3 – AI Support Bots

OEMs can drive further service optimization through AI support bots that provide autonomous, digital assistance.

Service technicians that require additional support can benefit from AI bots that autonomously deliver answers to questions, digital content such as drawings, pictures and videos, and rich sets of digital work instructions, to help workers resolve issues and complete the work independently. This allows a portion of customer remote assist requests to be handled autonomously, further increasing customer satisfaction and reducing direct support costs.

Augmentir Remote Assist for Field Service Technicians

Step 4 – AI-based Opportunity Insights

According to LNS Research, as workers become more connected, companies have access to a new rich source of activity, execution, and tribal data, and with proper AI tools, can gain insights into areas where the largest improvement opportunities exist for their service delivery. Artificial Intelligence lays a data-driven foundation for continuous improvement in the areas of productivity, quality, and workforce development, setting the stage to address the needs of a constantly changing workforce.

For example, after Augmentir is deployed for a number of months, our AI engine will start identifying patterns in the data that will allow you to focus your efforts on the areas that have the biggest customer satisfaction, productivity, and field service workforce development opportunities. This will allow you to answer questions such as:

  • Where should I invest to get the biggest improvement in customer satisfaction?
  • What service tasks have the largest productivity or quality opportunity?
  • Where would targeted training give me the biggest return?

Augmentir’s True Opportunity™ engine continuously updates its insights to enable companies to focus on their largest areas of opportunity, enabling you to deliver year over year improvements in key customer service metrics.

What is Your Digital Maturity?

Imagine, as you move forward on your connected worker journey, increasing customer satisfaction while reducing support costs, all while making your service delivery more productive – across your direct staff, dealers, or end customers.

Contact us today to take our digital maturity assessment and start your journey towards a digitally connected enterprise.

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Industrial Manufacturers are Facing a New Normal During COVID-19 and AI-Powered Connected Worker Technology is Here to Help

As Covid-19 changes the nature of work for manufacturing and services companies changes possibly forever, using innovations such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and connected worker technology to transform the enterprise has become more relevant than ever. For industrial companies, improving the safety and productivity of frontline workers in the COVID-19 era and […]

As Covid-19 changes the nature of work for manufacturing and services companies changes possibly forever, using innovations such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and connected worker technology to transform the enterprise has become more relevant than ever.

For industrial companies, improving the safety and productivity of frontline workers in the COVID-19 era and beyond through connected worker technology will be critical to business success and continuity. Tools like remote assistance, augmented work instructions, and knowledge sharing will be crucial to helping these companies transform their operations and continue to support their customers.

COVID-19 is forcing manufacturers to change how they operate
The industrial frontline workforce – skilled technicians, associates and engineers that are performing hands-on jobs in manufacturing, installation, and service – are facing unprecedented times. Already challenged by an aging and retiring workforce and increasing skills gap, a new set of challenges has emerged during this recent pandemic.

While manufacturers aren’t stopping operations because of COVID-19, they are running into major issues as a result of it, including:

  • The need for social distancing
  • Travel limitations and restrictions
  • Disruptions in workforce due to quarantining and shelter in place

You could look at these challenges as temporary, but one of the things that manufacturing and service companies have always relied on is face-to-face visits, in-person training, and “over the shoulder” problem solving to get the job done. However, we may never go back to the day where we can rely on face-to-face interactions to keep operations running.

While temporary measures like social distancing will eventually be lifted, some changes, like remote assistance and instant-skilling, will remain because they enable employees to perform their jobs independently, without requiring in-person assistance. This also cuts down on travel and allows workers to access information they need when and how they need it. Moving forward, industrial companies must focus on:

  • Enabling workers to perform jobs independently
  • Using remote assistance the standard, not face-to-face
  • Being able to instant skill any worker in the workforce to perform any job at any time

The Promise of Industrial AR/MR
Fortunately, manufacturers are turning to emerging digital technologies such as mobile and wearable devices and augmented and mixed reality (AR/MR) that are helping to connect a new generation of workers and allow organizations to proactively deliver the right level of support and guidance. There are several areas where these technologies are changing the manufacturing industry:

  • Training: instead of the classic classroom training, using AR to provide guided assistance to technicians as they work through a manufacturing process
  • Remote Expert Support: helps teach technicians new concepts, hands-on learning and training
  • Complex Assembly: using electronic work instructions and digital overlays to help guide workers through complex assembly procedures – ensuring quality and standardization
  • QA: use digital, AR-generated overlays to verify technicians work and help determine pass/fail on manufactured parts
  • Safety: providing not just safety training but guidance to newer workers as they are performing new tasks, operating new machines, etc.
  • Equipment Maintenance: used to help streamline factory equipment maintenance, repair, and service

But rates of adoptions for these types of technologies are low due to high cost, cumbersome tools, and lack of continuous improvement opportunities. This has resulted in many early adopters stuck in pilot purgatory, unable to scale beyond an initial proof-of-concept, especially during the recent pandemic.

Enter AI
By using artificial intelligence combined with connected worker technology, manufacturers can improve the safety, quality, and productivity of their workforce both during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond. At Augmentir, our vision is to use AI to empower each worker to continually do their best work and provide each worker exactly what they need, when they need it, and how they need it to close skills gaps at the moment of need.

Our vision at Augmentir is to transform connected worker technology with AI …

So, what exactly can you do with an AI-powered connected worker platform?

  • Enable independent work – empower your workforce to perform jobs more independently through step-by-step, augmented work instructions
  • “Instant skill” your workforce – use AI-based personalized work instructions that are tailored to each workers proficiency level to help them complete jobs at peak quality and performance
  • On-demand virtual support – Remote expert assistance and collaboration tools that enable remote support and guidance, amplified with AI-bots that accumulate and make available tribal knowledge for real-time virtual assistance.
  • Delivers hands-free operations – Augmentir on industrial smart glasses
  • Use AI to uncover True Opportunity™ – AI Separates “True” from “Raw” Opportunity to help identify areas where the largest improvements can be made

AI is uniquely suited to identifying capturable opportunities from the massive, noisy data set generated by frontline workers, and because of that, it can serve as the foundation for a company’s continuous improvement initiatives.

Another area where AI adds value is in using AI for continuous improvement around training and skilling-up of the workforce.

For instance, AI can identify specific individuals that would benefit from targeted training on a specific tool or procedure as well as improvements to content and instructions directed at the author.

And if you think about it – the possibilities are endless. There are a variety of areas that can be targeted for continuous improvement including the ecosystem of content authors, frontline workers, subject matter experts, operations managers, quality specialists, etc. Along with that, you’ll find dozens of opportunities to continually address the skills gap, improve quality, and improve overall performance.

View the webinar for more information

Why Enterprise AR Alone Fails to Provide Sustainable Value in Manufacturing

Judging by the plethora of images we see in the media of individuals wearing Augmented Reality (AR) sets in all aspects of their work-life, one could assume that Enterprise AR has been widely adopted amongst many companies. However, the reality of Enterprise AR is that most industrial companies have had difficulty creating sustainable value when […]

Enterprise AR

Judging by the plethora of images we see in the media of individuals wearing Augmented Reality (AR) sets in all aspects of their work-life, one could assume that Enterprise AR has been widely adopted amongst many companies. However, the reality of Enterprise AR is that most industrial companies have had difficulty creating sustainable value when attempting to implement the technology. One reason being is that most early AR vendors were overly focused on delivering information and digital work instructions to industrial workers via wearable devices, which has not produced the expected efficiency benefits.

Since many of the early adopters of AR solutions failed to justify cost and complexity compared to the minimal gains in efficiency, they got stuck in “pilot purgatory” where they weren’t able to successfully emerge from an initial proof-of-concept initiative.

First Wave of AR Solutions Failed to Find Widespread Adoption

But why is it, that a technology that promised to generate overall success and savings in resources, costs and time has failed to deliver? If we take a step back and examine the first wave of enterprise AR, we can pinpoint some of the reasons why Enterprise AR alone has been unable to provide the value that manufacturers are looking for causing a lack of widespread adoption:

  • Early AR solutions are characterized by high costs and long implementation cycles, which made them accessible only to the largest manufacturing enterprises that have high innovation budgets and significant resources.
  • Solutions were not tailored to small and mid-market manufacturing companies. 
  • Poorly implemented software solutions and early hardware that didn’t perform to the comfort, safety, and reliability expected by the users
  • Existing solutions only deliver information to frontline workers and with that have not been able to provide value beyond the initial one-time gain in productivity. 

Most importantly though, once the solutions were finally deployed, it became obvious that the software failed to provide value beyond the initial one-time gain in productivity, which was  frequently seen in use-cases where hands-free operation was the real source of the benefits derived.

Expanding the Value Proposition of Enterprise AR by Focusing on the Connected Worker

But just because the first wave of AR implementations have mostly failed, doesn’t mean that the technology doesn’t have the potential to generate great efficiency gains for industrial companies. We simply need to take a new approach. 

What’s been overlooked so far is the potential derived from collecting data about the work from this newfound connectivity to the worker via connected worker solutions. 

If you could envision workers as a new source of information to improve your processes, and if you used AI to analyze that data to create insights into every aspect of their productivity and training, you could benefit the entire organization.

 

 

3 Ways Connected Worker Technology is Keeping Manufacturing Businesses Afloat During COVID-19

The current COVID-19 crisis has impacted almost every industry worldwide, forcing businesses to implement work from home strategies, discontinue travel, and scale back on operations. Industrial and manufacturing businesses have been particularly affected by this due to reduced frontline worker availability, supply chain issues and the need to create social distancing workplaces for the health […]

The current COVID-19 crisis has impacted almost every industry worldwide, forcing businesses to implement work from home strategies, discontinue travel, and scale back on operations. Industrial and manufacturing businesses have been particularly affected by this due to reduced frontline worker availability, supply chain issues and the need to create social distancing workplaces for the health and safety of workers while also keeping them connected.

But in an industry that relies on the bulk of its operations to be carried out on-site, how can manufacturing businesses remain at capacity and keep frontline workers engaged during a time of remote working and travel restrictions?

According to Forbes, many leading manufacturing businesses are looking to Connected Worker technology to help manage these issues and keep up with operations. Through the use of augmented reality (AR) combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), a connected worker platform allows manufacturers to take advantage of digital information to carry out tasks on site and complete jobs. Here are 3 major ways connected worker technology is helping keep manufacturing businesses stay afloat during COVID-19:

 

  1. Flexible work arrangements that support social distancing
    As a result of COVID-19, manufacturers have initiated policies that encourage remote working, eliminate non-essential travel and instruct employees who are sick to stay home until they are better. This directly impacts the progression of operations that typically take place when multiple workers collaborate onsite. With on-demand remote expert functionality, onsite workers can quickly pull in an offsite colleague when their expertise is required. Procedures, videos, real-time data and more are readily available to intelligently guide and help workers on the job.

  2. Reduced complexity and downtime
    Manufacturers can expect a learning curve as they assess strategies and implement new ways to work more at home and less on the shop floors. Using a connected worker platform allows companies to pivot quickly in order to retain the workforce and reduce downtime during learning periods. Frontline workers are able to receive fully augmented, guided instructions on any device to improve productivity, quality and customer satisfaction.

  3. Gather insightful data to track progress during the crisis with AI
    It’s critical for manufacturers to monitor processes and track progress during this time so that they can make quick adjustments to ensure overall optimization. Incorporating AI into an AR strategy goes one step further by enabling true organizational optimization using the rich stream of activity data to recommend improvement actions to frontline workers, continuous improvement specialists, trainers, manufacturing engineers, and operation and service managers.

As this pandemic crisis continues to spread worldwide, manufacturers will likely continue to face challenges and look to connected worker technology to keep their workers safe and their businesses operating. It’s also important to recognize this as a major turning point in the way frontline workers interact and perform daily operations in the future. 

Augmentir Listed as a Top 3 Best New Solution Provider for Enterprise Augmented Reality powered by AI

Field Service News, a leading online journal dedicated to the Field Service industry, recently posted an article featuring Augmentir as one of their top three picks for best new solution providers in the Field Service Sector for Enterprise Augmented Reality (AR) powered by AI. Field Service News spoke with field service management professionals and field […]

enterprise augmented reality

Field Service News, a leading online journal dedicated to the Field Service industry, recently posted an article featuring Augmentir as one of their top three picks for best new solution providers in the Field Service Sector for Enterprise Augmented Reality (AR) powered by AI. Field Service News spoke with field service management professionals and field service solution providers across the globe over a 12 month period to cherry-pick the top three solutions that meet their needs.

What landed Augmentir on this notable list?

1.) Strong Leadership Team
The first reason is the strong leadership team with founding efforts at Wonderware, Lighthammer, and ThingWorx. The Augmentir team has a proven track record delivering industry-leading solutions in the industrial and manufacturing sectors.

2.) AI Powered Approach
In addition, Field Service Now calls out Augmentir for being different from the many Enterprise Augmented Reality providers that have suddenly noticed the potential in the field service industry and says, “the really interesting thing about Augmentir is that they’ve gone far beyond the initial approach that many of their peers are offering when it comes to Augmented Reality (AR) and dived straight into an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered approach. In their own words, they position themselves as the first software platform built on Artificial Intelligence in the world of the augmented or connected worker.”

3.) Powerful Platform with an Easy-to-Use Interface
Finally, taking an AI approach is important when it comes to the use of AR in Field Service, because when leveraged alongside AI, AR becomes much more useful and powerful. Augmentir is a 100% AI-first company and understands that AR is the interface that makes the most sense for modern field service operations.

About Augmentir

Augmentir is the world’s only Smart Connected Worker Suite. Augmentir is being used by manufacturing and service companies to empower their frontline workers to perform at their best and deliver improvements in safety, quality, and productivity consistently, year-over-year.

Request a live demo today to learn more about why leading manufacturers are choosing our solutions to improve their manufacturing processes.

Augmentir’s AI-Powered Augmented Worker Platform Improves Manufacturing Efficiency

This article was originally published on AI Authority. Leading manufacturer of operator interface systems and industrial displays, STRONGARM, has deployed Augmentir’s AI-Powered Augmented Worker Platform. The innovative producer of Hardened Workstations acknowledged that the AI-driven Augmented Worker platform has improved efficiencies and quality within a fortnight of its deployment. Currently, Augmentir, Inc. is a leading […]

Augmented Worker

This article was originally published on AI Authority.

Leading manufacturer of operator interface systems and industrial displays, STRONGARM, has deployed Augmentir’s AI-Powered Augmented Worker Platform. The innovative producer of Hardened Workstations acknowledged that the AI-driven Augmented Worker platform has improved efficiencies and quality within a fortnight of its deployment. Currently, Augmentir, Inc. is a leading provider of Augmented Worker software for industrial companies.

Last month, Augmentir announced it has closed an oversubscribed funding round, led by Pritzker Group Venture Capital, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, current investors, and HOLT Ventures, the strategic venture capital arm of HOLT CAT.

STRONGARM has expanded the use of Augmentir’s AI-Powered Augmented Worker Platform across its operations, resulting in improved technician performance and training, better insight into job status, and improved quality.

What STRONGARM Achieved with AI-Powered Augmented Worker Platform

In an official press release, STRONGARM posted,

“Because the process was so easy, our technicians were able to quickly incorporate Augmentir into their daily operations, and the results were immediate – technician productivity improved, and inspection times went down. Furthermore, when one of our senior and most experienced technicians retired recently, we were able to onboard a new technician and trust Augmentir’s AI engine to guide him during the learning curve to get (the) product out the door at 100% quality so that we didn’t miss shipments. Once Augmentir’s AI engine determined that the worker had become proficient, it recommended that the instructions should be adjusted to enable him to complete the job faster while still meeting quality and safety goals. This has resulted in a 20% reduction in average build time in our most complex workstations.”

Steve Thorne, General Manager of Operations at STRONGARM stated,

“We chose Augmentir because their platform allows us to not only digitize and standardize on our manufacturing work instructions, but also to intelligently close the skills gaps when on-boarding new technicians. In addition, it’s AI-based ‘True Opportunity™’ system enables us to gain insight into how our technicians are performing, and autonomously identifies our largest capturable opportunities across our entire operation.”

“The use of Augmentir across our manufacturing operation represents an important step for us in our digital journey and continued commitment to quality and innovation in the products we build,” added Steve.

The Future of Manufacturing Lies with Digitally-Enabled AI and Robotics

STRONGARM designs and manufactures ergonomic and environmentally protected workstations for companies in a wide range of markets, including food, pharmaceutical, CPG, packaging, and transportation, with additional interface solutions for specialized verticals including STRONGARMenergy and STRONGARMhealthcare.

The company credits its long-term leadership position to its commitment to innovation. Since its 1990 founding, STRONGARM has maintained a robust “lot-size-one” offering wherein STRONGARM collaborates with clients, and then designs innovates, fabricates, and assembles these customer-specific products, all in-house.

Russ Fadel, Co-Founder, and CEO at Augmentir, said, “STRONGARM is a great example of a small, innovative manufacturing company that was able to capitalize on the emerging trends around Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation.”

Russ added, “Augmentir was uniquely designed to meet the needs of industrial companies of all sizes, enabling even small to mid-sized manufacturing companies to get the benefits of Industry 4.0 today. Our SaaS-based ‘consumerized’ enterprise software approach makes trying, buying, and owning Augmentir simple, with free pilots, low IT support, and best in class usability.”

According to Thorne, STRONGARM started seeing value from Augmentir within 10 days of their Augmentir rollout. “The process for getting our operation set up with the Augmentir platform was easy and painless, with little required IT overhead,” stated Thorne.

STRONGARM plans to expand its use of Augmentir into the manufacturing operations of their ruggedized workstations used in the Oil and Gas industry.

The Augmentir Platform includes complete functionality that makes it easy for industrial companies to improve their operations across a range of manufacturing and service use cases. The Platform provides software that helps guide frontline workers with augmented, step-by-step-instructions, assist workers with live remove expert collaboration, and utilizes its AI engine to deliver organization-wide insights and recommendations that focus on improving the quality and productivity of frontline workers.

Augmentir is the first of its kind to combine enterprise Augmented Reality (AR) with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) to empower frontline workers, helping workers perform their jobs with higher quality and increased productivity while driving continuous improvement across the organization.

Is Artificial Intelligence a Feature or an Architecture?

This post by Augmentir CEO Russ Fadel was originally published on Medium. I have been a fan of Marc Andreessen since the Netscape days — he has consistently predicted the macro changes in numerous marketscapes before virtually anyone else. Recently, I was watching Marc on Youtube “Why You Should Be Optimistic About the Future” and […]

Artificial Intelligene

This post by Augmentir CEO Russ Fadel was originally published on Medium.

I have been a fan of Marc Andreessen since the Netscape days — he has consistently predicted the macro changes in numerous marketscapes before virtually anyone else. Recently, I was watching Marc on Youtube “Why You Should Be Optimistic About the Future” and found his discussion on Artificial Intelligence (AI) particularly enlightening, and in complete alignment with Augmentir’s journey. The entire video is worth watching, but the discussion on AI runs from between the 7:00 to 9:00 minute mark.

Some of the most insightful (paraphrased) quotes include:

  • “There is a more fundamental question — is artificial intelligence a feature or an architecture?”
  • “A16z sees this with most start-up pitches now — ‘here are the 5 things my product does…and oh yeah, AI is always bullet number 6.’ Number 6 because it was the bullet they added after they created the deck”
  • “If AI is a feature, then this is correct, where every product will have AI sprinkled on it.”
  • “We (a16z) believe AI is an Architecture, and if it is, everything above this will need to be rewritten.”
  • “Ultimately, the goal of AI is to answer questions, even before the have been posed.”

At Augmentir we had to make a strategic decision at the time of company founding (late 2017), as to whether artificial intelligence was going to be a feature of our connected worker platform or, whether it was going to be the architecture that our connected worker functionality ran on. We didn’t frame the decision as elegantly as Marc did, but we nevertheless asked, “will AI be a feature of our product or will it be pervasive?”

Even though no one in our space had chosen this path, we decided AI would be pervasive. We postulated that the purpose of a connected worker platform wasn’t to deliver instructions and remote support to a frontline worker, but rather to optimize the performance of the connected worker ecosystem. We knew that AI was uniquely able to address the fundamental macrotrends of growing skills gaps and the loss of tribal knowledge. With an ecosystem of content authors, frontline workers, subject matter experts, operations managers, continuous improvement engineers, and quality specialists, we predicted that there were dozens of opportunities to improve performance.

By building our connected worker platform on an AI architecture, all data is automatically pipelined, labelled, and cleansed, and is immediately available to start generating insights and recommendations. On this journey, the scope of what we can use AI for has even surprised us. Our initial thoughts were on personalizing instructions and content to make each frontline worker perform this current task safely and as quickly as they can, given their current proficiency. This immediately expanded to a generalized True Opportunity™ system that uses AI to stack rank where an organization has the largest capturable opportunities across all stakeholders. The range of this is astounding: which jobs have the largest monthly opportunity, which workers can benefit from targeted training, what is the optimum time to perform any given task, what inline training material can benefit from an update, what content/procedures would benefit the most from an update, etc.

The future looks even more fantastic — AI bots offer a realistic opportunity to capture tribal knowledge and convert it to a scalable corporate asset, and AI Diagnostic bots to make everyone an immediate expert.

This is only possible when you view AI as an architecture, not as a feature.