Imagine having a tireless teammate watching your back 24/7, never missing a beat when it comes to keeping you safe. That’s exactly what AI agents in manufacturing are capable of today.

Spot AI uses cameras and AI agents to spot safety issues, send alerts, and collect data that can improve safety training in the future. Yes, a human could do all that. But who wants to spend 8 hours a day reviewing footage? In this episode, Dunchadhn Lyons, Director of Engineering, shares a real-world example of a safety manager freeing up time and reducing safety incidents by 40%.

He joins us at Batch Brewing for our Automate afterparty, along with this episode’s co-host, Jake Hall, aka The Manufacturing Millennial.

We explore how AI agents are transforming ordinary security cameras into intelligent safety monitors that can spot forklift near-misses, missing PPE, and operational bottlenecks before they become costly problems. Plus, we chat about how these "AI teammates" can capture and preserve the invaluable knowledge of experienced workers before they retire – addressing one of manufacturing's biggest challenges. Tune in for the full story and don’t forget to subscribe!

In this episode, find out:

• Dunchadhn breaks down the basics of what an AI agent in manufacturing is and how they’re designed to make our lives easier
• How Spot AI uses cameras as “AI teammates” to monitor for potential safety issues and use data for training
• How an AI agent could be used to fill in the gaps in knowledge after people start retiring in manufacturing
• Where Dunchadhn sees the future of AI agents headed and how Spot AI could expand beyond using cameras
• The best use cases for AI agents and Spot AI’s solution in manufacturing
• Dunchadhn shares an example of one workplace where they achieved a 40% reduction in safety issues
• How manufacturers can get started with improving safety with AI and why adopting Spot AI’s solution is simpler than you might think
• How to get buy-in from a team to use cameras for safety monitoring
• How Spot AI can also help businesses make operational improvements, with one example of a company avoiding millions in lost revenue
• Where can AI agents go in the future? Dunchadhn shares his predictions for the future of AI agents in manufacturing
• The best way to get more people onboard with AI agents

Enjoying the show? Please leave us a review here. Even one sentence helps. It’s feedback from Manufacturing All-Stars like you that keeps us going!

Tweetable Quotes:

• "A 40% reduction in safety incidents means that people are safer. It means you can go to work, get your job done, and you can go to your family without having a fear of ending up in the hospital for a couple of weeks."
•  "AI agents can serve as training mechanisms for other new human employees so that tribal knowledge is not lost."
• "These AI teammates are really about supporting humans, making humans safer, making humans more efficient, and augmenting human abilities. There's definitely no notion of replacement or monitoring."

Links & mentions:

• Spot AI, video AI agents for the physical world
• Batch Brewing, brewery and restaurant located in Corktown, Detroit, MI

Without customer buy-in, even the most innovative robotics automation products can fall flat. But the approach most manufacturers take with new products is to build them first, then get feedback. In this episode, you’ll hear how one company flipped the script and did robotics product development the other way around.

Joining this episode is Anthony Leo, President of IPR Robotics, a robotics automation company, to explain how a customer advisory board became invaluable for uncovering exactly what customers need – before they even built the product. You’ll also hear Mandy Dwight, Founder of Dwight & Company, a marketing and sales company that works with automation companies to tell and sell their story to customers.

While they come from different areas of the sales cycle, both Mandy and Anthony share great insights into how products are transformed from ideas to implemented solutions. We hear about how to avoid customer prevention and friction in the sales cycle, how larger companies can act like startups, and the secrets to selling based on value, not just technical specs.

In this episode, find out:

• We talk about all the important food places and bars in the Boston and Detroit areas our guests come from
• How Anthony and Mandy first met and decided to start working together
• Why companies need to fully support those in R&D to drive product innovation
• How IPR’s Sawyer robot brought something new to the market at the time as a two-armed humanoid robot
• The different strengths that Mandy and Anthony bring to the manufacturing and product innovation space
• The top lessons they’ve learned from their previous experiences in the industry that they still use in their roles today
• Why the most important lesson Mandy learned as a marketing business founder is to listen to customers
• The importance of telling a company’s value story and selling beyond the tech spec sheets
• Why all stakeholders in the sales cycle need to understand the value story and how that can look different for each one
• Why Anthony built an advisory board of customers to get feedback and insights before starting development
• How large companies can use startup style tactics to fast-track product innovation
• What a “customer prevention team” does to remove friction from the buying process
• Why you sometimes need to build an ecosystem of partners to reduce friction
• The secrets to a great product innovation team and why silos in a company should be avoided
• Mandy explains more about what IPR Robotics does from her perspective as a marketer

Enjoying the show? Please leave us a review here. Even one sentence helps. It’s feedback from Manufacturing All-Stars like you that keeps us going!

Tweetable Quotes:

• "Instead of burning a bunch of cash trying to go through development, let's go find three to five customers that we think fit in the wheelhouse of the problem we think we found and ask them if they wouldn't mind being involved in the development of the product." – Anthony
• "A lot of founders tell the technical story... But a customer wants to hear value. How is this automation going to show up in my facility and really be a game changer." – Mandy
• "People buy from people at the end of the day. Some people are willing to spend more money with people they trust and solve problems... compared to saving 10, 20% and dealing with headaches the whole way through." – Anthony

Links & mentions:

How does a startup scale? It all starts with a great product that solves a real problem. And sometimes that means taking the slow and steady road to startup success.

Recorded at Trillium Brewing in Boston, we sit down with Adi Dalvi, the VP of Sales at OSARO, a company that specializes in robot piece-picking and machine learning solutions to automate warehouse tasks. With minimal marketing in the early days, OSARO managed to grow and scale operations to deliver holistic systems to solve real warehouse challenges.

The secret? Rather than rushing technology and products to market and hoping someone bites, OSARO spent years perfecting products before deploying. We hear about how its founders, with backgrounds in industry, achieved calculated growth and targeted the right customers from the beginning.

Adi shares his view on the four types of people you need on your startup team, how OSARO set 3-step criteria for finding the right customers, and Adi’s approach to getting great case studies from customers.

In this episode, find out:

• Adi gives a breakdown of what OSARO does – developing vision software and machine learning to integrate with articulating arm robots in the warehouse
• What “calculated growth” means at OSARO and the importance of taking the time to develop products before deploying
• Why Adi wouldn’t describe OSARO as a startup anymore and instead a company in early-stage growth
• Why companies shouldn’t rush to get products out when they’re still in the research project stage
• The benefits of having founders come from industry
• The three-step criteria OSARO used to pick the right customers in the beginning
• How startups can extend their runway and keep investors updated with the progress
• Adi’s method for getting customer case studies in the early negotiation stages with customers
• What four types of founder backgrounds bring to a startup and why you benefit from having them all
• How OSARO managed to achieve growth without marketing in the early days by focusing on perfecting the product
• Adi’s advice for startups just trying to get early customers so they can grow and scale successfully
• The best part about running this podcast and how things have changed since going down the entrepreneur route

Enjoying the show? Please leave us a review here. Even one sentence helps. It’s feedback from Manufacturing All-Stars like you that keeps us going!

Tweetable Quotes:

• "Really testing your product, making sure it's robust with actual products that you're going to pick is very important as you move from very early company to somebody that can scale."
• "They wanted to have a deployable product before they actually deployed to a customer site... You don't want to deploy a research project into your customers’ warehouses where they're actually fulfilling orders for their customers."
• "What [someone with a VC background] brings is they’ve seen a lot of competing technologies and understand what those technologies are doing well and what they're not doing well."

Links & mentions:

• OSARO, manufacturer of robot piece-picking and machine learning solutions to automate warehouse tasks
• Adi’s Pittsburgh brewery crawl, including Grist House, Dancing Gnome, Pittsburgh Brewing Co., and