I’m Betting on AI in Manufacturing

I didn’t plan to work in manufacturing until I saw it’s where AI can actually matter.

From AI Research to Factory Floors

I studied robotics and AI at UPenn and Stanford, focused on systems that could perceive, learn, and adapt in real time. I spent years building AI models, ones that could sort noise from signal, flag issues before they happened, and automate the parts people didn’t want to deal with.

But when I started working with food manufacturers, the gap became obvious. These were massive operations. Billions of dollars in product, moving around the clock and yet, so much still ran on paper, memory, and people chasing answers across the floor.

Most of the data already existed. But it was siloed, scattered, or ignored.

The Missed Opportunity

Manufacturing is a $16 trillion global industry but despite that scale, adoption of AI on the shop floor is still early. In our customer research, we found that the majority of manufacturers had deployed any form of AI in operations, and most of that was in predictive maintenance or quality inspection, not real-time process optimization.

The opportunity isn’t about replacing people. It’s about capturing the intelligence they already use every day so it doesn’t get lost after every shift change or staffing shakeup.

I’ve always liked finding patterns, looking at a messy system and figuring out what’s really going on. In factories, those patterns are everywhere - a temperature spike before a line stoppage, a repeated issue during night shift, an operator who always seems to solve things faster.

The problem is, those patterns rarely get captured and even when they do, no one has time to look back. LineWise is built to become the AI layer that learns from how your plant actually runs, then helps you fix what matters, faster. Not a new MES or a giant install, just a system that listens, learns, and surfaces the stuff you’d otherwise miss.

Enterprise Is Slow

We’re not pretending this is easy. Selling into manufacturing means navigating long sales cycles, cautious teams, and legacy tools that are hard to move away from.

But the fundamentals are shifting, the skilled labor shortage is real, operating costs are rising, and plants are under more pressure than ever to do more with less.

That’s where AI helps, not as a silver bullet, but as a force multiplier. You don’t need to rip and replace everything, you just need a layer that helps your best people get even better.

Why I’m Still in It

AI is all they hype right now, but in the end I believe in building things that people keep using because they actually work.

LineWise started from a simple idea: that there’s more value in connecting existing knowledge than in replacing everything. That real operational intelligence isn’t about dashboards or alerts, it’s about helping teams make better calls in the moment, every shift, every day.

Having been here for a while, this industry is changing slowly, but it’s changing. We’re building the layer that makes that change usable and sustainable.

The team behind it all

From - Will Z