I was sitting in a meeting with a customer this morning, and a thought kept running through my head: why aren’t more people outsourcing work to computer programs in our industry?
The turbomachinery industry has no shortage of brilliant PhD-level engineers who have a million correct reasons to explain why solving complex flow issues is so complicated; but have they considered how utilizing artificial intelligence may be able to lighten the load?
Our task this morning was to help a customer who is developing an innovative piece of turbomachinery for waste heat recovery as well as their end-customer who will have the pilot machine installed. Our role during the call felt akin to the role of an application engineer; meaning that we did not have to do a complex design on the fly. Instead we answered complex questions about a set of data which we know and have pre-calculated.
It seems that opportunities for leveraging Artificial Intelligence are all around us and are becoming mainstream, but are not as widely used in our industry as if feel they could be, and still seen as an R&D pipe dream rather than a commercial and business engine.
It has been about a year since we at SoftInWay started seriously developing and using our AI engine AxSTREAM.AI; it was driven by 3 needs:
1. With a size of 85-90 people and a customer rate growing at about 20-30% a year, how can we offer increasingly better engineering services faster, without sacrificing quality or cost-effectiveness?
2. How can we support the Sales team properly in preparing proposals and engineering concepts without having to use un-billable engineering time?
3. How do we help our external customers who have “one-off" projects to complete them efficiently and NOT have to pay for permanent in-house employee or external consultant rates to do work.
Coming from math/finance background the answer was always simple in my mind: train an AI program to do the work so that our team is maximizing their time thinking about new ideas, and everything that was done before in design and application engineering can be in one way or another reflected in a training network or methodology.
I feel that this can be helpful to large companies trying to capitalize of years of historical experience and counter the losses of workforce turnover due to age, as well as startups that don’t have the budget to hire a full engineering team, or the internal skillset to do all of the work.
Do you agree or disagree?
If this sounds like a familiar problem to you, it might be time to consider “hiring” AxSTREAM.AI to tackle your project before things get “supercritical”. Let me know via private message or email: Valentine@softinway.com