Abundant Intelligence at the Midwest AI Summit

Key takeaways

• In an industrial hose manufacturing plant, engineers separated defect detection from text generation: computer vision and graph databases detect the flaws, while the language model only drafts explanations subject to deterministic guardrails. Read more →
• Enterprise AI pilots usually stall between prototype and production because teams force large language models to perform steps that deterministic software should handle. Read more →
• Deploying an AI agent onto enterprise cloud infrastructure does not make it production-ready. Without structured evaluation benchmarks, Kevin Solorio argues that any deployed system remains an unverified proof of concept. Read more →
• Chris Shinkle warns against chasing the dark factory fantasy, where autonomous agents write, test, review, and deploy code without human engineers touching the keyboard. Read more →
• Software teams do not need a fully automated dark factory to benefit from AI; Lean manufacturing demonstrates that core principles hold true across environments while practices must shift based on constraints. Read more →