The AI boom is bypassing physical industry workers
An article in this month’s issue of The Fabricator underscores that physical industry workers are not experiencing the same AI boom as information workers.
The Fabricator is a trade publication for the metal forming and fabrication industry.
Senior Editor Tim Heston makes a case for the value of PowerPoint automation (with ChatGPT and Copilot) only after acknowledging this elephant in the room:
“AI can do 80% of [a PowerPoint] almost immediately… That shaved 90 minutes off a presentation-building ‘cycle time.’
“Such productivity improvements on the floor would be looked at as astounding. An automatically generated PowerPoint, not so much.”
Nevertheless, Heston proceeds to make the point that reducing effort to pitch new work does have value, just perhaps not at the level of production process.
He sees more opportunity in automating job scheduling to minimize wait time between workstations, but also points out that this kind of optimization may not always require AI.
As tech professionals, we should recognize that our AI moment is not impacting every industry the same.
And frankly, the fact that metal fabricators–with all their mechanical know-how and automation expertise–aren’t finding anything better to do with our AI tools than PowerPoint (!) is a bit damning for us in tech.
Are we so accustomed to designing for information workers that we’re overlooking opportunities for workers in more physical industries?
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are multiple efforts underway to make LLMs and diffusion models more physically embedded and contextually aware. On the other side of the aisle, industrial robots are starting to integrate voice and are continuing to improve at vision tasks.
But it requires people with both technical and industry awareness to connect the dots and build paradigm-shifting AI tools for people with physical workflows.
If you’re designing for AI and are looking to broaden your perspective beyond traditional tech audiences, I can help. Grab time to chat.