u/KNGC3D

Probably not a hot take, but after talking to hundreds of manufacturing companies in the US, unfortunately it seems clear to me that there’s not good data infrastructure for AI to be revolutionary inside manufacturing plants.

Yeah, there’s a lot of AI hype around the world, specifically in software. I’m not a software developer. I’m a mechanical engineer. I love manufacturing, engineering, and I also love AI. It has revolutionized my life and I’ve become a power user. I can be honest to say even though the latest models are super powerful, AI is not prefect. Still needs a lot of baby sitting for it to be impactful.

But, inside manufacturing plants, there are so many dumb mistakes that can be solved with real time visibility, getting ahead of problems, software not from the 90s. The cases are endless. The 2% of manufacturers are 5 years ahead. But the 98% of manufacturing plants are still years behind.

And I actually don’t care if people think AI is useless. If you haven’t used the latest AI models, Codex or Claude Code, built agents, or complex systems, you haven’t seen the magic yet. For the people that have seen the power of AI, do you agree with this take?

https://preview.redd.it/0r9qbe2wdmzg1.png?width=2610&format=png&auto=webp&s=9f0d8e25b7078ea76421756aa85985ed8b9b0726

This report came out from MaintainX today. 2,234 maintenance/ops leaders surveyed.

My biggest 4 takeaways:

1. 79% of teams still can’t reduce unplanned downtime. So what are all these systems actually fixing?
2. Parts and inventory management is the #1 lever for reducing downtime cost according to the people surveyed
3. PMs are “important,” but half of teams spend less than 40% of their time on planned maintenance.
4. According to MaintainX, AI is going mainstream, which I disagree because this sample size is small compared to the entire industrial base and I've talked to a lot of people that aren't even allowed to use basic tools like ChatGPT inside manufacturing plants.

Link: https://www.getmaintainx.com/state-of-industrial-maintenance-report?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=linkedin_thoughtleader_jake_soim26-DG&utm_content=soim2026

Any thoughts?