Industry 4.0 breakthroughs like AI-driven welding work brilliantly in one cell but fail to scale because companies prototype by adding features, not by proving the solution works across dozens of sites. The real bottleneck isn't technical anymore. It's organizational.
I think speed and scale go together, so that's why when we talk about the technology, often in a cell of manufacturing, and we're doing this at the moment with some customers around welding techniques or something like that, you can really do some nice innovations using things like AI, high-frequency data analytics, but that's going to have an impact at quite a local level. So that's where you wouldn't necessarily be able to productize that. because it doesn't have the opportunity to potentially scale, but it can still have a great impact, but it may have an impact at more of a local level. When you can identify something that can scale across a business, I think the challenges then move from a technology point of view to an organizational structural point of view. And I'd only say that now when we're talking about Industry 4 technologies, I think that's the big difference to me between Industry 3 technologies and Industry 4. Industry 3 technologies were never built to scale. They were always built to be localized because they were there, even like we talked about PLC programming or HMIs, you know, they were never built to scale. And that's one of the problems with prototyping. Prototyping is all about features and functions, not about whether you can scale it. So if during that prototyping you're not proving out what you're trying to achieve, as in the outcome or the objective, which could be to have the biggest impact across 80 manufacturing sites, if you're not doing that as a part of that prototyping, then you don't have the intention ever to make that scale work.
