ReliabilityRadio EP 368: Graham Provost, C3AI

There's a massive amount of learning, and I'm really looking forward to the, uh, the workshop that I'm giving tomorrow morning, and which-

Ooh.

Yeah.

Hot take.

What are we, what are we learning in your workshop tomorrow?

So we're learning about, um, anomaly detection and then also construction and deployment of AI agents associated with that.

So when we get into the workshop, we're gonna be talking a lot about, you know, this is classically how things have been done.

This is, you know, where our organization was two or three years ago.

Other people are there right now, but now as we look forward, uh, how are we applying, uh, employing AI directly within our application, and then also building workflows to automate a lot of the things that our customers traditionally have done so that we can save them time, save them money, uh, provide more accurate results, and get all that, um, straight to the end user as qui- quickly as possible.

Let me ask you a question about that, right? So this is a, as you said, one of the most learning conferences you've ever been to.

Well, us here at the r- in the reliability community, we really build ourselves up by learning from each other because nobody comes out of college learning how to do reliability and asset management, unfortunately.

So in your presentation that you're gonna be doing tomorrow, you talked about putting together workflows for companies.

I got to imagine when you're going into an organization, they mo- probably already have their idea of workflows and how they wanna use data to make decisions.

Now, how will, how does your work usually reconcile with an existing process while you're trying to put on your overlay from C3.ai?

Yeah.

So that, that's actually an awesome question.

So we do it this way.

You know, we, we ask our cus- our customers what it is they're doing right now, but then on top of that, we spend time with their end users to look at what they're actually doing.

And we're finding out as we go through day in the life with all of our large strategic customers and the new customers, we're walking through how all of their reliability engineers and then frontline maintainers are actually functioning, uh, with the software that they're using and with the software that we're going to give them.

And then when we aggregate all of that across every single industry, we're working with companies like, um...

I mean, you can look at our, our website.

Some, some of the stuff that's publicized is our work with the US Air Force and our readiness application.

But as we push forward with that, we're looking at all those maintainers and all the reliability engineers, and then we're aggregating that all and putting it together with the information to say, "What's really the root, uh, of all of this workflow? Uh, what's the, the core?" And then we build out around that, that core of each one of the workflows to satisfy what our customer really needs to do.