Manufacturing floors struggle to pass along tacit knowledge because people communicate slower and messier than machines do. AI chat systems like ChatGPT could replace thick manuals with digestible formats and capture shop floor conversations to preserve expertise across the workforce.
I think the potential in manufacturing is, on the surface, it's similar to the potential in other industries. I think one of the things that we do more of in manufacturing is we try to understand what's happening. And manufacturing plants are always a combination of process machines and people. And speaking to machines is easy in some ways, right? Machines can only say 2 words. They say 0 and 1. Yeah. Some of them say it really quickly, and if you can interpret the zeros and ones, you can figure out what the machine's telling you. We're not that simple. Not only do we communicate with, you know, a whole bunch of different words, you know, how we feel is super important. You can't talk to us quickly, even though I try, and you can't talk to us all the time. So one of the first things is that, you know, there's all this knowledge and understanding in manufacturing. That is kind of jammed up because of the fact it's harder to get this information to others. So I would say in the, you know, there's sort of 2 things that are exciting about the use of this technology in manufacturing. One is the ability to communicate and share information with people in all levels on the shop floor. So if you have useful information, share it. And it's, you know, rather than giving somebody a PDF, like I just, You start with a business and you get like a 30-page employment manual and say, oh my God, who actually reads that, right? You know, it's being able to consume content in an easy way, but in addition, the ability to listen. And I think that's kind of one of the things that I haven't heard as much of. But in addition to the ability to communicate, ChatGPT has the ability to listen and collect and summarize.
