In a remarkably cut-to-the-chase interview at the New York Stock Exchange, Augury CEO Saar Yoskovitz slices through the hype and the noise to explain how AI is successfully reshaping manufacturing. In short, it’s about ignoring the shiny bits and focusing on the desired business outcomes.
In late October 2024, Augury’s CEO and Co-Founder Saar Yoskovitz sat down with host John Furrier during the East Coast AI Leaders’ Executive Series presented by theCUBE and NYSE Wired. The resulting interview – fueled by the obvious expertise of both guest and host – offers a clear vision of AI’s impact on the manufacturing industry. Watch it: You can learn a lot in just 21 minutes.
Here are some quotable quotes from the broadcast:
The Importance of Trust in Manufacturing
“AI is a tool, it’s not an outcome. Let’s focus on what is the business outcome that you want to drive, and only then on what’s the right toolset to achieve it. What we’re seeing specifically in the industrial market is that there is no room for mistakes. I tell the team, ‘At the end of the day, we don’t sell sensors, and we don’t sell AI; we sell trust.’ And if our customers want to see the behavioral change, the cultural change and the impact, and if the maintenance technician or the operator doesn’t trust the system, they go back to their old habits.”
Infusing Reliable AI Into Every Layer of The Stack
“We’re infusing AI into every layer of the stack, and we mean it. We have a new sensor we just launched a couple of months ago: it’s the industry’s first sensor that is capable of running Edge AI, running neural networks on the Edge. Then, the whole network architecture is also infused by AI and self-healing networks because the reliability of the network and the safety and security of the network are as important as a result.”
Why Manufacturers Are Rushing to Embrace AI
“In our conversations with executives and senior executives in manufacturing, what they’ve noticed is that the tools that they used to have in the toolbox are no longer available. This means they can’t just offshore to China anymore because of geopolitical issues and supply chain risks. They can’t hire more people because they can’t find more skilled talent. They can’t raise prices because of the economy. And now we have sustainability pressure from regulators or the consumers. So, they fundamentally need to think differently about how they run a production line or a factory.”
How To Bypass the Data Tarpit
“One of the biggest challenges in the industry today is we talk about data lakes, but in reality, we have data swamps or data tarpits depending on how grim you want to be. […] That is a huge challenge because every factory, even if they use the same machines by the same OEMs, has a different system integrator that customizes it, et cetera. Our first approach for what we call Machine Health has been to create our own data set. We don’t need to integrate into anything. We come in, we superglue a few sensors on your machine, connect it to the Cloud, and we basically bypass all of the legacy systems while working with IT and working with security, but bypassing all of the legacy systems and creating that direct connection. The time to value could be as quick as one day.”
The Future
“We started as a predictive maintenance company, and then we understood that the problem that we solve is not really a maintenance problem, it’s a sustainability problem, and a supply chain resiliency problem, et cetera. We went broader into what we call Machine Health. And over time, a couple of years ago, we said, ‘Okay, even this is not ambitious enough.’ Now, our customers are asking us to also go into the process and the operation side. We understand that there’s a bigger picture called Production Health. We want to build the operating system of the AI-driven factory.”
Watch the full interview with host John Furrier during the East Coast AI Leaders’ Executive Series presented by theCUBE and NYSE Wired.
