Welcome to Manufacturing Minute!

I'm glad you're here.

Let's get to it.

But first, a word about doing more with less:

Are you stuck missing the production targets from 2 years ago while your budget hasn’t adjusted since COVID?

Most plant managers are sitting on 15-30% (maybe even 50%) untapped capacity, they just don't know where to look. At Axiom, we help you find it without buying new equipment, hiring more people, or waiting for next year's capital budget.

Ready to unlock what you already have?

Book Your (free) 30-Minute Strategy Call →

Over 90% of critical minerals are refined outside the US.

That’s been the topic of a lot of discussion lately online. Because you can't reshore manufacturing if you don't control the stuff that manufacturing is made of.

Some encouraging moves happening, reference pricing agreements with Mexico, the EU, and Japan. A new US Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve. Real investment in domestic mining and refining capacity, not just talk.

Which is good, because we learned the hard way what happens when a single disruption overseas shuts down production lines in Indiana. The question isn't whether it'll happen again. It's whether we'll be less exposed when it does.

Worth watching closely.

Alright, stay with me on this one.

AI is like Depends for the senior workforce.

Not because you're washed up. Not because you're out of the game. But because you're done playing it safe.

I've been around enough plants and enough boardrooms to know this: the most dangerous people in manufacturing aren't the 25-year-olds with fresh CS degrees. It's the 55-year-old controls engineer who finally stopped caring about looking stupid and started experimenting again.

That person with 30 years of tribal knowledge, the one who can walk a production floor and hear that something's off before any sensor picks it up — that person was always the most valuable asset in the building. They just got buried under a decade of playing defense. Protecting what they'd built. Avoiding the career-ending mistake.

AI changes the math on that.

Here's what I mean.

I talk to a lot of experienced engineers and operations leaders who quietly admit they've been sitting on ideas for years.

Good ideas.

Ideas that could move the needle.

But the risk of being wrong, of championing something that flops, kept them in maintenance mode.

Now imagine handing that same person a tool that:

We spend so much time in this industry talking about the "next generation workforce" like they're going to parachute in and save us.

Meanwhile, we've got an entire generation of operators, engineers, and plant managers sitting right there, people who know where the bodies are buried, and we're not giving them permission to take risks anymore.

AI is that permission slip.

It's the quiet insurance policy. Spotting the leaks. Catching the slips. Letting experience run faster than it used to.

My 80-year-old dad could run the hell out of a plant. He's bored out of his mind. He doesn't want to drive Uber, that would probably be dangerous at his age, but he's got decades of operational wisdom that is just sitting on the shelf. Multiply that by a few million people, and you start to see the real workforce crisis isn't a shortage of talent. It's a waste of talent.

The conversation shouldn't be "how do we get young people interested in manufacturing?"

It should be "how do we re-arm the people who already know what they're doing?"

Same wisdom, now leak-proof.

So yeah.

AI is Depends.

And I'm not embarrassed to wear them.

As promised, tactical manufacturing in a minute,

Ryan