223: The State of Automation Halfway Through the Decade, Live from the 2025 A3 Business Forum

Engineering & simulationCaddyreducing drawing search time by 90% and procurement costs by up to 10%

The tool analyzes engineering drawings to extract data and links them to purchase orders or spec sheets, allowing teams to identify common parts across catalogs to optimize production and reduce costs.

“Caddy analyzes drawings to extract data and creates a link to every PO or cam file or spec sheet. That design has ever been associated with. This lets your team start to leverage hidden commonalities across your parts catalog to optimize production and reduce costs.”

Engineering & simulationReshape Automation / Deep Learning

The company applied deep learning to bin picking by training a dataset of potential grasps for infinite objects, allowing robots to learn how to grasp items without traditional complex programming.

“So if we, instead of that, train a data set of potential grasp for infinite objects, and then learn, then can we add some, um, prolistic methods on the learning into the mix, we work better. Bean picking was perfect.”

Quality & testDeep Learning / Machine Vision

Deep learning algorithms are used for quality inspection by analyzing pixels to detect defects like scratches or cracks, replacing traditional deterministic vision methods that lacked explainability.

“Been picking being run. I would say, my team vision applied to quality inspection. Okay, would be another one. It's still very deep learning bass. So, very learning a steal on pixels. There is no explainability, right?”

Customer supportLLMs (Large Language Models)

LLMs are used as AI co-pilots for human-in-the-loop support, where the AI provides answers to queries that are then curated by humans, enhancing capabilities without the risk of hallucinations in direct robot control.

“But if there is a human giving a a query, then the AI giving you an answer and then another human curating that, the possibilities are endless, right? So very optimistic of doing that as an AI copilot, right? As a human compiler.”