Insights

Practical Perspectives on AI and Operations

For mid-size manufacturers navigating automation, AI deployment, and the discipline required to make both of them work.

Nobody Approved the Safety Stock

Your ERP vendor is shipping AI agents into the system of record, and the twice-yearly meeting where you used to approve changes is being retired. The control that matters is signing authority, and it doesn’t cover software that acts.

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The Green Dashboard Is Not Evidence

Twenty-one of twenty-one checks passed and the approval link was dead. The automation failures that cost you are the ones that report success, and you will not find them by reading the design.

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The Workaround Is the Report

When operators route around a system that works, they aren’t resisting it. They’re reporting a defect in it. Most rollouts have nowhere for that report to go.

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The Clean-Data Trap

Waiting to clean the data before you automate is the loop that keeps mid-size manufacturers stuck in pilot. Automate the one workflow that matters, and it tells you which data was ever worth fixing.

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Reliability, Not Autonomy

Manufacturers spent 2026 pointing AI agents at whole processes and watching them fail. The problem was never the model. It was automating a process that was never made reliable first.

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The AI Tab Comes Due

Enterprise AI budgets are blowing up. The root cause isn’t the token price — it’s the same failure this practice was built to prevent.

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94% Use It. 4% Capture It.

Procurement’s GenAI adoption gap isn’t a technology failure. It’s what happens when individual productivity gains skip the process redesign that would make them organizational.

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Why 2026 Is the Moment

Automation didn’t fail. Your operating model did. Three shifts changed what automation can do in 2026, but the fundamentals of data, process, and ownership still decide whether it works.

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What Problem Solvers Can Learn from Artists

The most effective problem solvers share a set of habits with professional artists. None of those habits involve waiting for inspiration.

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