Adapted from a recent conversation with CEO Brent Pietrzak. Listen to the full episode: Where Should a Mid-Market CEO Start With AI? ft. Brent Pietrzak, CEO, CAI Software
If you run a plant, a processing line or a print operation, you have heard a lot about AI this year. The question that matters is closer to home: is the software that schedules your production, tracks your inventory and keeps you compliant moving forward with you, or standing still? At CAI, we are all in on AI, and we are building AI manufacturing software that delivers measurable performance in planning, production, quality and compliance, in the operations you run every day. You get a partner that has made the decision, built the organization and is already delivering faster because of it.
It starts with an AI strategy
Last year, we made a decision bigger than any single acquisition: AI would be central to how we operate, and we would not wait to see how the market settled before committing.
Our CEO, Brent Pietrzak, is direct about why. "I interact with a lot of companies that don't have a strategy," he says. "They just start doing stuff with AI." Experimentation without a goal is how companies spend a great deal of time and money and have nothing to show for it. So we started at the top, with a clearly defined strategy and a high bar: enterprise-wide, touching every employee, and aimed at AI that delivers work rather than tools that help people type a little faster.
Built for your industry
AI only works in manufacturing when it is shaped by people who understand manufacturing. That is the belief our whole approach rests on.
When asked what he thinks others get wrong about AI, Brent points to domain knowledge. "AI is great. It's incredible for many different things," he says. "But the people who have that domain knowledge are what drive the efficacy of the AI. It can't make great progress without it."
CAI serves industries as different as seafood processing and aerospace, so AI has to be built differently for each. Anything specific to your industry is developed inside the division that serves it, by engineers who understand your operating environment, regulations and constraints. Capabilities that apply across all three divisions, including how AI is priced and packaged, are built once and shared, so you never have to navigate dozens of different models. It is the principle behind every CAI solution for more than 45 years, and across more than 6,500 customers in real-world operating conditions: fit the way your business actually runs, so performance comes standard.
Faster development, faster delivery
The clearest result of our AI strategy so far is speed in how we build.
Our engineering teams have adopted an AI-first software development lifecycle, which means AI is built into how we plan, write, test and ship software rather than bolted on as an assistant. We measured it from the start. Within four to five months, products using that approach were moving three to seven times faster than before. In one example, work our teams had estimated at up to 28 months was completed in three to four weeks.
For you, that shows up over time as faster fixes and features as the work reaches the products you run. As Brent puts it, "the only way that we can tell that is by measuring it," and we hold ourselves to the numbers: velocity, quality and how much our own people actually use AI.
One AI leader, one AI platform
An AI strategy that depends on a dozen tools and a committee does not survive its second year. We made two structural decisions so ours would.
First, one person owns it. In April we combined technology and AI leadership into a single Chief AI and Technology Officer. "AI and technology are so interlinked that it's really helpful to have one person who is making the decisions with the lens to both," Brent says. For a company our size, two chiefs would mean two executives negotiating over one set of decisions. We wanted one person who wakes up every day thinking about what we are doing with AI, and the mandate to act on it.
Second, one platform. We were using a variety of AI tools across the business. We standardized on a single provider as our core infrastructure. "Although you get some benefit from some of the unique capabilities," Brent says of the old approach, "what you don't get is the ability to share great things easily." Now a capability built for one division moves to the other two, and we can keep investing in your systems without rebuilding them every time the technology shifts. The same discipline applies to how we bring acquired companies in: they are integrated within three to six months, so we can provide you with benefits of a connected system immediately.
Where AI Fits in Your Operation
The right AI doesn’t disrupt your operation. It accelerates it. CAI’s AI manufacturing software is designed to fit your industry, work with the systems you already run, and keep getting better as you scale. Let’s talk about where it can deliver the most performance for you.
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Listen to the full conversation with Brent Pietrzak on CAI's AI strategy: Where Should a Mid-Market CEO Start With AI? ft. Brent Pietrzak, CEO, CAI Software
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