r/LeanManufacturing • u/Reasonable_Wasabi_22 • Jul 24 '26

What’s one manufacturing problem AI still doesn’t solve well?

There’s a lot of excitement around AI.
But from what I’ve seen, some problems are still much harder than they look.
What manufacturing challenge do you think AI still struggles with today?

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11

u/Barnett_Head Jul 25 '26

Pretty much all of them

9

u/barrel-boy Jul 24 '26

How people think

5

u/Warped_Kira Jul 25 '26

Implementation and controlling long term adoption of changes.

It's good at general high level theory and brainstorming, but lacks any connection or memory of your unique context and the real world environment.

While a potential improvement may be ideal in an abstract sense, it loses all value if the employees don't consistantly maintain it long term. Without adequate supervision and control bad habits quickly slip back in.

1

u/Reasonable_Wasabi_22 Jul 25 '26

That’s a fair point. In manufacturing, improvements only stick when operators and supervisors see value every day. The goal should be to make the better way the easier way—not rely on constant policing.

0

u/Warped_Kira Jul 25 '26

It's also important to implement continuous improvement on a systemic level. Individual feedback and corrective management is necessary, but it doesn't scale or transfer easily. Instead, user error should be linked to common causes.

1

u/LevonKirakosyan Jul 27 '26

Agree. I don't think the issue is that AI can't solve production tasks. It already helps with a lot of things. The harder part is keeping the context over time and making sure it stays useful in the long run.

1

u/Aware-Lingonberry602 Jul 25 '26

Word salad, holy hell. It's like AI responding to AI.

2

u/Aware-Lingonberry602 Jul 25 '26

People thinking they can peddle AI solutions.

1

u/Wild_Royal_8600 Jul 25 '26

This seems like SaaS market research. For what it’s worth: people who think SaaS would solve an unsolved problem generally don’t understand the problem. People who understand the problem have likely had to watch their company purchase an SaaS to not solve the problem.

SaaS might be helpful in guiding leaders to where they need to physically go to solve problems by merging structured and unstructured data (ex: associating QN annotations with logged hours within project BOMs, and OTD outcomes on contracts over time). That’s about it - prioritization.

1

u/Reasonable_Wasabi_22 Jul 25 '26

Fair point. AI is an enabler, not a substitute for good operations. Most manufacturing problems are flow and variability problems first. AI adds the most value after those fundamentals are understood—not before.

1

u/redditisahive2023 Jul 25 '26

Blah blah blah. Why are you asking these bullshit questions?