There’s a persistent cultural narrative about AI. That it- regardless of application, functionality or circumstance- is designed to take. That it comes in, outpaces labour, emulates craftsmanship and replaces workforces without giving anything back, other than value to the shareholders. 

ECI’s new AI, announced at the Hannover Messe earlier this year proves this de-facto narrative wrong.

KonnectAi, created by ECI in partnership with Google, is designed to complement and uplift rather than compete with the existing manufacturing workforce. Enhancing efficiency and increasing digital skills, this AI’s development is driven by a desire to see the manufacturing sector and its people enter an era of digital transformation with confidence and competence. Manufacturing Digital sat down with Jarred Knecht, the President of ProEV and Promark Electronics, divisions of Electrical Components International, to discuss KonnectAi, and what exactly it was going to take to make manufacturing sexy. 

We start by discussing KonnectAi’s inception. According to Jarred, it was born three years ago from a need in ECI’s business. ECI is a global electronics manufacturer with 40 plants across the world, 25,000 employees, and complex supply chain operations. Jarred was already enthusiastic about the potential ways AI could enhance the business but recognised its application needed to be practical and long-lasting. “It needed to be something tangible that could affect the day-to-day operations of our business,” he said. “ Improve efficiency, improve quality, improve cost, all of those things together.” 

Then, a vital opportunity was recognised- ECI’s quality inspection and traceability.  “We realised that that space hadn't been tremendously reinvented in a long time,” Jarred explained, before discussing the inefficiency of traditional methods of quality inspection like ERP systems or using other types of IT systems to track and trace. “ Most quality inspections are done by the human eye, incorporated with an assisting piece of equipment or machinery. We wanted to refine the accuracy and efficiency of this, and that’s how the AI was born.” 

Today, Konnect AI has expanded beyond ECI, pitched to manufacturers as a simple yet extremely powerful AI quality control solution. “We partnered with Google to use their cloud computing and cloud hosting services to make it really scalable and accessible to manufacturers all over the world,” Jarred said. “KonnectAI has to deliver a return on investment within the first week of deployment. If we don't see tangible results in a week, there's something wrong.” I asked Jarred what these results had to look like, for both individual manufacturers and the wider sector.

“It needs to help reduce costs, improve efficiency, enhance people's skills, attract the next generation, and help with business development,” he explained. “ We want manufacturing to succeed and grow in the global economy, especially in North America and in Europe. We want to maintain that competitiveness, we want to attract that next generation. Konnect AI’s software was the way for us to do all that packaged into one tangible application which was quality inspection and traceability.” 

KonnectAi: A tool to help manufacturing succeed

Jarred stressed the genesis of KonnectAI was ECI’s nature as a manufacturer, not a software development business. AI, to him, serves as the catalyst to make manufacturers implement more tech into their businesses and understand its industry-changing potential. “ In terms of empowering people and attracting the next generation using AI, it was a means to an end,” Jarred explains. “ We asked ourselves, how do we get manufacturers to use more tech in their business? First and foremost, let's look at ourselves. Prove that there's a tangible result that can't cost more.” 

Back then, there wasn’t the same AI craze that’s exploded over the past two years. Jarred paints a vivid picture of a manufacturing sphere that lacked concrete information and documentation about AI, where companies were hesitant to invest and the technology wasn’t as prevalent in the market. “ We had a bit of learning to do then,” he says, reflecting on how this period solidified his understanding of what manufacturers- like ECI- want from AI. “We are the manufacturer,” Jarred said. “ We are building this for manufacturers. We needed to make sure that the product is super simple, usable and delivers that return on investment because without that you can't hope to break the AI barrier.” 

KonnectAI has seen success in breaking the AI barrier in its factories. ECI currently uses it in five of its facilities across the world, with the positive feedback received from employees shaping ongoing investment. “That's when we realised it had this ability to bridge this generational gap,” Jarred added. There is a marked generational gap towards AI in manufacturing, with younger generations typically expressing more excitement, while older hires are often put off by the technology’s presumed complexity. In ECI’s facilities, however, they saw equal levels of enthusiasm for Konnect AI across all employee age groups. This is because it was simple, easy to use and made a measurable positive impact on their day-to-day work.

“What we saw was that training time was drastically reduced,” Jarred explains. “ We saw the

confidence levels in the employees and confidence of their work dramatically increase.” He then described the benefits of having AI give employees feedback rather than a veteran employee, leaning over their shoulder. “ You have this unbiased piece of technology that's smarter than you know, 100 inspectors with 1000 years of experience telling them instantly if what they're doing is a good job or a bad job. It became this kind of game of self-motivation, using the platform in their work.” 

Improving the workforce’s confidence and quality of work wasn’t the only benefit, which brings us back to Jarred’s time-tested catchphrase. “Manufacturers have a difficult time attracting younger talent because of this draw towards sexier businesses such as technology, software, marketing, advertising,” Jarred adds. “ People want younger generations. They want them in those spaces, so how do we bring them back into manufacturing?” KonnectAI is as much about people as it is about technology. This is an AI built not to showcase technological superiority but to bring people together into a new age of technological innovation. 

“Our AI is here to enhance people and not to replace people,” Jarred says. “ There shouldn't be this fear of replacement, especially in what we're trying to do. We see this as an entry point for manufacturers, that brings down the barrier to entry. We need to give manufacturers these simple, accessible tools with very powerful technology running in the background, but make it easy for them to adopt, easy for them to test and deliver a tangible result very quickly for us.”

The future of KonnectAi 

KonnectAI is now commercially available for sale, and Jarred sees a future where more and more industry sectors start to benefit. “The goal for us is to bring on board as many customers as possible in different areas of manufacturing. The software itself is hosted with Google Cloud and is unlimitedly scalable. So we can launch it anywhere in the world and deploy it virtually for anyone. We’re targeting manufacturers of any size.” They’re targeting manufacturers of any industry too. 

ECI has used its AI in many different use cases already in electronics, food processing and inspections of metal and plastic parts. This expansion feels like a natural next step, considering what drew Jarred and ECI towards AI in the first place was its capacity to be easily tailored to a diversity of manufacturing sectors. Making the AI easy to tailor, implement and use was critical to its operational and commercial success. 

“If the AI couldn’t be easily tailored, implemented and used, then it would’ve missed the mark. If this AI is going to cost a significant amount of money or time to implement, then most manufacturers just won’t do it.” Jarred explains. “ To ask manufacturers to change their processes to incorporate a piece of technology is very difficult. It increases risk, it increases cost and then they need to dedicate resources internally to do that.” 

Jarred’s words on how customers need to see a return on investment right away bring us back to how successfully implementing AI is as much a mindset challenge as it is a technological one. It’s pivotal that the misconception of AI as an expensive, ineffective headache that bogs down rather than benefits the workforce is addressed. I asked him if he could say anything to the manufacturing sector about AI, what would it be? His response was bold and decisive. “You need to find a way to start,” he said. “The number one takeaway is that it’s the future. Don't ignore it.” 

He encouraged businesses to start small with their AI implementation, focusing on one element of their process to bring down the barrier to entry. “Get your people familiar with what it can do and how powerful it is, and over time it will continue to expand into other areas of your business,” Jarred continued, finishing on an encouraging note. “ Once you do break that barrier you’ll be unstoppable.” 

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