IRIS is out today: why factories with people will win

In 1998, at the Keraben tile plant, one of the star products kept ending up in the scrap bin because of a curvature nobody could see. We solved it with an artificial intelligence written in LISP together with Ángel Pascual del Pobil, AI professor at Universitat Jaume I and my teacher back in my university years. That AI learned from what the kiln operators knew. It was my first AI in a factory, and the lesson it taught me has stayed with me across more than three hundred deployments: the best results come when AI and people work together and each makes the other better.

I wrote this book out of a responsibility I feel called to. In the coming years, millions of plant leaders will have to choose between two kinds of AI: the kind that replaces people and the kind that empowers them. Replacement is the easy option: it deploys fast and pays back quickly. But what I have seen in a lifetime on the factory floor is that, within two or three years, that option strips the company itself of what made it competitive. Repeated across thousands of plants, it could trigger a social crisis of enormous proportions: job losses on a global scale that would benefit no one, owners included.

At the speed replacement AI is already being deployed, neither I nor the thousands of companies working on human-empowering AI will be able to sit at all those tables in time. This book is my way of reaching them. In it I explain both options honestly, with cases and numbers, and why I sincerely believe one is better than the other. I may be wrong. But if you are the one who has to decide, you deserve to do it with all the information on the table. And the decision is yours: nobody knows your plant better than you do.

Thanks to Jay Lee for the foreword, and to the clients and teams behind every case.

I hope it helps you choose well.