- Essays··8 min read
The Defect You Cannot Photograph
Industrial AI vision inspection vendors cite 97–99% detection accuracy — a figure almost always trained on defects the line never made. Synthetic data can cover rare failure modes, but only after someone characterises the production environment precisely enough to generate physically plausible images and then audits the output by hand. The months nobody budgets for that work are what separate a convincing pilot from a system that holds under real production variance.
industrial-aicomputer-visionsynthetic-datamanufacturingRead - Essays··11 min read
When the Model Works and the Line Does Not
Seventy-seven per cent of AI vision pilots in manufacturing never reach full deployment — not because the detection accuracy is wrong, but because the factory floor is. This essay traces six failure modes: environments the training set never saw, integrations that ran eight times over budget, thresholds nobody will own in writing, and models that drift when procurement switches supplier. The automation thesis survives the pilot. The line does not.
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