BONUS: Purpose-Built AI for Manufacturing: How AI Agents Are Transforming Workflows on the Factory Floor with Apprentice CEO Angelo Stracquatanio

Running the companyA1 (Apprentice AI Agent)cycle time compressed from a quarter to a week

The company used its own A1 AI agents to compress its business cycle time from a quarter to a week by automating internal workflows and increasing team throughput.

“What used to take a quarter, though. We've compressed it down to a week, a literal week. Where now we have a weekly tempo, where now we do the exact same thing, just on a weekly basis. And so, where did this time compression come from? This time compression came from now leveraging agents internally, which we use our own product internally, we use A1 internally…”

Engineering & simulationApprentice 4.1

The team fine-tuned a state-of-the-art model on 12 years of internal manufacturing knowledge to create a deterministic, domain-specific AI model that outputs hyper-specific, compliant manufacturing responses rather than general ones.

“First, we created our own AI model. We fine-tuned a uh, stay of the art model, and we trained it on 12 years worth of our knowledge, not customer data. Our knowledge, our expertise, we fine-tuned our own AI model that we call Apprentice 4.one. Apprentice 4.one is designed to then output responses that are specific and unique to manufacturing.”

Running the companyA1 (Quality Agent)

A quality agent automated the initial investigation of production exceptions by finding them and performing a first-pass analysis, helping quality leaders understand plan status and close out exceptions faster.

“Conversely, the quality agent will go find the exceptions that occur, do initial pass on the investigation, and help the quality leader help understand what's happening in my plans, how do we close out these exceptions faster, and go on from there.”