How Does Harmony AI Decide What to Build Next?

Brian McKeown says Harmony AI decides what to build next from the people living in the weeds of customer factories. The team holds product roadmap meetings, probably weekly, and asks what problems show up in a factory and how a problem could translate to someone else's factory. The meetings produce a bird's eye view of how manufacturing behaves.

Two weeks before the conversation, Brian McKeown was at the International Woodworking Fair in Atlanta. A woodcutter with a sawmill in West Virginia said customers such as Mossberg and Moon Pie do not seem to behave like a woodcutter. Brian McKeown asked whether the mill has machines. The mill debarks the log with a machine, runs chop saws in the planer mill, and cuts wood to size. Mossberg has machines too. He then asked whether the mill has material. The mill turns a log into wood. Mossberg makes guns and turns parts into guns. Each owner thinks one factory is very different from another factory. Some of the difference is real, and some of the assumed difference is wrong. The work is still similar enough for an ontological data solution.

Harmony AI has learned where the product goes by finding the commonalities and representing them in the model in a semi-standard way that repeats at factory after factory.