The Hidden Reason AI Projects Fail | Jason Luce, CTO, Paperless Parts

So maybe if people don't know about Paperless Parts, let's explain what the business is, first of all.

You look at what gets made in the real world and use Boeing as an example.

Boeing makes airplanes.

We know that they actually make very little of what goes into an airplane.

So they're what we would call, they're an OEM, right? They're an integrator.

They design and build airplanes.

But then they'll have someone like a GE make engines.

But GE doesn't really make most of what goes into the engines.

A lot of that gets made by other manufacturers downstream in the supply chain.

And so those are people that will make precision parts that are detailed specifications to fit inside an engine, for example, valves, housings, all of these things.

The manufacturing companies that make those are our customers.

And so these are what we would talk about, the tier two suppliers in our industrial supply chain that make the small, physical, custom things that need to go into things that get made all over the country, all over the world.

And so when you take a look at that from aerospace and then you think across medical devices, construction, heavy machinery, space, all of these industries, it turns into a network of tens of thousands of companies in the U.S. alone that are involved in making all of the physical things that we see around us every day.

I think most people don't really think about it so much that that's actually what it takes to build the things that are around us.

And so Paperless Parts, we sit in the front office.

So our goal as a company is to help manufacturers be more successful in their business.

And where we sit is from that time that they first receive an RFQ, a request to build something, to the time they then are actually bidding on that work.

And so we think about these companies dealing with what we would call high mix, low volume is how they'll always describe themselves, meaning they do a very wide array of things that they build at lower volume.

So completely different world from what I think a lot of people think of when you say manufacturing.

People picture this huge facility that's printing millions of individual things.

Our customers are not those.

Our customers are the manufacturers that build small numbers of these high precision parts.

So the challenge they face is that when they talk about those tens of thousands of companies and all of these things that need to be built, successful manufacturers in this space are doing this hundreds, if not thousands of times per week in terms of getting what literally is an email.

with attachments that could be a 3D CAD model, a 2D PDF technical drawing of something to be built, maybe a spreadsheet of other specifications.

And they then have to analyze all of that information, decide how they would build it, determine how much it would cost them to build and how long it would take to build it, and then get that bid back to their potential customer.