EMS@C-LEVEL
As Forbes, Entrepreneur, Fast Company and SCOOP writer, Philip Stoten, continues to talk to EMS (Electronic Manufacturing Services) executives he learns more about their individual and collective experiences and their expectations for their own businesses and for the entire electronic manufacturing industry.
EMS@C-LEVEL
IPC at Electronica 24: AI in Manufacturing, Talent and Training with John Mitchell
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Can AI revolutionize the workforce without placing jobs at risk? Join me as I uncover the intricacies of this pressing question with John Mitchell, President and CEO of IPC, at Electronica 2024. We dive into the current talent issues and explore how AI is not just a tool for efficiency but a transformative force in the labor market. John shares his insights into the European market's struggles and paints a vivid picture of AI's potential to enhance rather than replace human workers. Through intriguing examples like the high-speed world of fast fashion, we reveal how AI can streamline operations and optimize decision-making in expected and unexpected ways.
We also emphasize the importance of preserving tribal knowledge as seasoned professionals retire from the EMS industry. Discover how AI can act as a custodian of this invaluable expertise while maintaining the growth and learning curve for newcomers. Together, we strike a balance between leveraging AI for efficiency and ensuring experiential learning remains a cornerstone for emerging professionals.
Tune in to gain a comprehensive understanding of AI's role in shaping the workforce's future and equipping businesses to navigate the challenges and opportunities ahead.
EMS@C-Level at electronica 2024 was hosted by IPC (https://www.ipc.org/)
EMS@C-Level is hosted by global inspection leaders Koh Young (https://www.kohyoung.com) and Global Electronics Association (https://www.electronics.org)
You can see video versions of all of the EMS@C-Level pods on our YouTube playlist.
Hello, I'm Philip Stoughton. I'm at Electronica 2024. I'm on the IPC booth with President and CEO John Mitchell. John, thanks for joining me. Always a pleasure to chat, my pleasure always, and thank you so much for hosting us here.
Speaker 2Oh yeah, it's great to have you.
Speaker 1It's nice to see so many people and lots of people at your panels, lots going on in the booth, so congratulations on that. We often talk about labor shortages. We've talked a lot about that over the last year or so. The market's kind of changed a little bit, um, but labor still remains a challenge. And what's really interesting in discussions recently is there is a relationship between labor, training and ai coming into the marketplace, and I'm curious how you personally see it because I know it's a very big area of interest for you but also how ipc sees that, that synergistic relationship yeah, so it's.
Speaker 2It's interesting Right now in the industry. There's some strong areas and some weak areas. So here at Electronica specifically, I've had the opportunity to talk with many and we'll talk with many more industry leaders about what's going well, what's not going well. The European market is struggling right now. Yeah, it's tough and it's tough.
Speaker 2So when you talk about workforce, some of them are looking to potentially reduce and one of the ways you know, I don't usually talk about AI as a reduction force. It's usually a way of enhancing and that's really the truth. But at the same time, you gain efficiencies and if you need those in tough times, ai can be utilized. But AI has lots of opportunities to benefit the workforce. I mean, we've all been using it now for a little while and it's still shockingly. Amazingly, I mean, it just pulls some really good stuff together. Just as a simple unrelated industry example, I was reading a book by some Nobel-winning economist why Nations Fail. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but I had seen a critique about it and I wanted to know are there other reputable sources that have critiqued this, both positively or negatively? And I just put it simply I got two pages of great content and.
Speaker 2I had just finished reading the the book and I'm like, actually these are spot on points. So if you can do that with just a 17-hour book and get it in seconds, when we're trying to make sure that we're doing the proper analysis of data, that we're trying to better optimize our lines, or we're trying to better optimize our lines, or we're trying to look at you know sets of information about you know quality and make better decisions about that, I think it's just, it's criminal if you're not doing it. Yeah, no, absolutely I agree.
Speaker 1I think what's fascinating. I actually interviewed an AI specialist recently not from the manufacturing industry and we were talking about how you can draw parallels from other industries and your example was a great example of that. But we were talking about the unpredictability of demand and how that trickles through the supply chain and using AI to do that. And a great example of how that's done is the fast fashion industry. The fast fashion industry is moving really quickly to deploy styles and iterating really quickly.
Speaker 2Today is orange. It reminds me, do you remember the? There's an old movie based on Wizard of Oz called the Wiz and it's like today's color is orange and everybody turns orange.
Speaker 1It's just that fast, yeah, so it's fascinating to see that. What I think is really interesting and again this is a discussion point that came up is there's so much tribal knowledge in the EMS industry, knowledge that's been built up through long careers, lots of challenges, decades of things not going the way they should and actually working out how to do it.
Speaker 1Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Some of that is going out of the industry because they're aging out. So there's a desire to get that information into AI, but there's a sense that if we do that, some of the young people that are coming through aren't going to be so battle-scarred and aren't going to have learned in the same way. So I'm really interested to see how we can develop this triangle that is tribal knowledge, ai co-pilot and the new, the younger generation, comes through, and how we train them, yeah, so I think of it kind of like, you know, let's use sports as an analogy.
Speaker 2I can read an awful lot about Viking form, yeah, and based on that I can get pretty close, but everybody's a little bit unique. Based on that, I can get pretty close, but everybody's a little bit unique, and if I don't actually practice it, I'm not going to be as good as if I just read it or watch videos. And so, to me, these guys, as you mentioned, the gray-haired groups, the gurus these guys have not only studied but practiced and learned what really isn't working, and it's been hard to document that. And so if AI can pull some of that out, we'll speed the development. But it can't be that alone.
Speaker 2The new generation is still going to have to go through its own struggles, and hopefully we'll avoid struggles that we've already gone through. But there'll be new learning and new challenges through, but there'll be new learning and new challenges, and so I just look at it as an accelerant. You know, instead of having to wait five years before I have, you know, a good set of industry expertise, maybe I can get up to speed in a year and a half, and now the industry can utilize people more fully, faster.
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean that's fascinating, isn't it? And I want to draw another parallel which I think is really interesting, from another industry. The studying of languages has really changed with AI. You know, you've got programs like Make Me Fluent, jumpspeak, all of those programs that are customizing tuition to the person, on the other end, in a very successful way, you know, really accelerating that process of learning languages. When you look at that as a training organization, which is a big cornerstone of what IPC does, how do you think about can we utilize that Can?
Speaker 2we customize training, and is that in?
Speaker 1development, or is that a secret?
Speaker 2That's a very exciting idea. No, we are absolutely looking at doing things like that. So you know the the science of learning is a passion of mine and you know, you, how learning, how to learn, meta learning right Is is really about there's repetition and then working on the things that you're not good at.
Speaker 2And that's why you know often, when you're trying to learn something, they say making mistakes actually solidifies something. Because if you sit there and just take a test and you're like oh, yep, yep, yep and you got it, you're more likely to forget it than if you missed 20% of the answers and you had to go back and review why you missed that. And so that making willing to stretch yourself, make mistakes and then learn from it better solidifies learning mistakes and then learn from it better solidifies learning. And so what AI can do is the more information and this gets into privacy issues, you know.
Speaker 2If people are worried about, oh well, what if my boss knows that I'm making these mistakes? But instead of thinking that negatively, think of it positively. If I can capture all the mistakes I'm making, then the AI can sit there and assess what were the principles that I didn't understand as well and very narrowly, instead of taking, you know, three weeks worth of courses to try to become better at a specific skill. Say, there's actually just four different areas of the skill that I really need improvement on, and we're looking to do things like an assessment to say how good are you at this and where you're weak. Maybe those are your modules. Or maybe, after you've done the basic, there's a way to continually interact with the system so it can say we're going to send you an updated module, take 30 minutes sometime next week and you're going to just get better.
Speaker 1Yeah, I think it's fascinating and I'm excited to hear that you are working on that as a strategy and what the possibilities are, and I look forward to learning more about that. Just before we finish, I just wanted to say that, having attended the IPC seminar, the EMS seminar in Gdansk, and being here this week, ipc in Europe is doing a really good job at the moment, so kudos for you.
Speaker 2Thank you Kudos for Philippe and Sanjay. We like to think of IPC as the Global Electronics Association, and so that's really what we're out here to be is be where, and what we need to be to wherever the industry is.
Speaker 1Yeah, and when I meet people and I see the events so well attended by the senior management in the large organizations here in Europe, it really does solidify that global approach but also deliver locally, which I think is working really well. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2Well done for doing that.
Speaker 1Thanks for talking to me and we'll talk again soon, thank you, thank you.