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October 18, 2024 | Marcy LaRont, I-Connect007Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Most likely, there aren’t many manufacturing summits that take place on an aircraft carrier, so it was pretty impressive to be on the USS Hornet, with a beautiful view of the San Francisco harbor at Build Better 2024 on Wednesday, October 16, 2024. The event was billed as “the only manufacturing summit for engineering and operations leaders developing electronics.”
I appreciated that the summit leveraged its location by focusing solely on manufacturing and NPI, but with a strong software and AI lens—we were in Silicon Valley, after all. This “boat” is now a museum in Alameda, and was the perfect place to congregate, learn, and network.
Certainly, when it was built, the USS Hornet was cutting-edge defense tech for its time, so it was not lost on me that a piece of American history is an interesting juxtaposition for a conference focused on creating visionary, future tech. The location served to highlight the industry’s current focus on defense and its nexus with technology in today’s complicated world.
The conference, aptly named “The Next Way,” featured 11 short presentations, several of which were only 15 minutes long, and three dedicated networking events throughout the day. This rapid-fire approach to presentations was a good way to keep the audience engaged, especially with breaks to network, which all the attendees seemed to capitalize on.
The event was hosted by Instrumental, a manufacturing software company offering an AI and data platform for manufacturers to connect existing data and generate new data, including an interesting new feature using AI to more quickly get through the failure analysis process. Anna-Katarina Shedetsky, co-founder and CEO of Instrumental, explained that this tool allows for companies to quickly react to minor product variations, literally going through thousands of variations and identifying the ones that really matter. She indicated that this would both decrease product development time and allow OEMs to build more profit margin into their products up front.
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