The manufacturing industry, while being extremely diverse (from cheese to smartphones to sportswear), is also quite uniform from a business perspective:

You're just trying to transform raw materials into a certain product, as cheaply and quickly as possible.

There's a never-ending race to do things better and more sustainably, by eliminating waste. Naturally, there's all this buzzword bingo about "industry 4.0" and smart connected factories, but very little light on how you actually connect and upgrade factories.

In today's episode, I sit with Bertil Helseth, the CEO of Intelecy, a platform that allows factories to use AI to identify opportunities for improving their outputs, and eliminating "waste." We discuss the ground realities of the manufacturing industry, and how AI is helping!

01:30 - Intro
02:36 - Using ML to fix manufacturing inefficiencies: cheese production case study
13:52 - Helping manufacturing engineers build ML models with the click of a button
19:37 - The importance of defining “normal production” in manufacturing
20:06 - The types of data available in a typical factory
26:09 - The pace of industry transformation: choosing the right factories to work with
37:30 - Challenges of onboarding a factory to an ML platform
44:21 - Intelecy's journey and how Bertil started the company
48:42 - Cement as the most electricity extensive industry
49:48 - Intelecy’s fundraising strategy, differences between US vs Europe
59:39 - Bertil's learning experience and wins in starting up Intelecy