Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Unlocking Industry Knowledge: The Future of Smart Manufacturing

1 Apr 2025 · 1 min

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1:11

In this panel excerpt, the speakers discuss the vision of creating a Siri‑like conversational assistant tailored for manufacturing environments. They explore the difficulty of instantly locating relevant, authoritative information for workers on the shop floor and propose crowdsourcing industry expertise to build a definitive knowledge base. The conversation highlights the role of knowledge graphs for capturing and sharing this expertise, the need to identify trusted documents and resources amid a flood of information, and the potential of blockchain and smart‑contract mechanisms to enable secure, transactional interactions between connected parties. Overall, the dialogue frames the technical and practical challenges of aggregating, validating, and monetizing manufacturing knowledge in the era of smart factories.

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And because you go back to that concept of a Siri-like bot trained on manufacturing, right? Like, well, how do we do that, right? How big is that problem? And we've had some conversations with some of our tech partners recently about finding somebody or some article or some reference that can help me in the moment is a really difficult task. And so how do we do that? So we're constantly looking about how can we crowdsource the definitive knowledge base in industry based off of the experiences of the people that are working, right? Those sorts of things. So those are some areas like knowledge graphs and knowledge capture sharing, those types of things that we have our eye on. And in addition to, like Kathy said, if we're going to connect people together and there's the potential for them to transact together, then, you know, certainly blockchain and, you know, sort of contract management types of things we're keeping an eye on as well.
I think the other part about that to add in is it's not just having the time to consume all of it, but it's how do you find the trusted word that's out there, the trusted documents, the trusted resources, as well as we have, you know, people selling us everything.