Silicon Valley keeps getting manufacturing wrong. Jim Mayer, Autumn Moon, and I sat down at a real shop in Phoenix to talk about why.
We recorded an episode of The Manufacturing Connector at ATD Precision Manufacturing on the hottest day in Arizona this year, and it was one of the most honest hours I've spent on a microphone in a long time.
We got into why Silicon Valley is the worst group to help manufacturers, what the workforce crisis actually looks like on a floor instead of in a headline, the shop that detonates explosives to fuse metal, and why I left a job in a skyscraper to build for the people who make things.
My takeaways
1. People don't resist change. They choose it every day. What they resist is a system they had no hand in building. Give operators the tools to build their own, and adoption stops being the problem.
2. 65% of digital transformations fail. It's almost always because someone bought the solution before anyone understood the business. Map first. AI second.
3. Your biggest AI risk isn't the technology. It's the person retiring in March with decades of knowledge in their head and none of it written down.
4. You can't serve this industry from a desk on the coast. We also talked about my grandfather's thirty years at a fish processing plant, and why that shapes how I think about who we build for.
The full episode is available on The Manufacturing Connector. If you'd rather have this conversation in person, so would I. Find time with us.
