The AI in Business Podcast

The skilled labor crisis in industrial equipment service is not a future problem; it is eroding operational performance now, as retiring engineers take decades of institutional knowledge with them and incoming technicians cannot fill the gap at speed. In this episode, Mike Hughes, Group Service Director at Peak International Group, outlines how service organizations can close the expertise gap through smarter knowledge capture, targeted AI deployment, and a frontline-first approach to modernization. The conversation covers remote diagnostics, first-time fix performance, the realities of working with imperfect data, and the two or three use cases leaders should prioritize before attempting a broader transformation. This episode is sponsored by Aquant. Learn how brands work with Emerj and other Emerj Media options at go.emerj.com/partner

A widening gap has emerged between the speed of AI innovation and the ability of large enterprises to deploy it responsibly, leading many organizations to repeat avoidable mistakes in scaling. In this episode, Shaje Ganny, Author, Guest Lecturer, TEDx Speaker, and Digital Transformation Director at Procter & Gamble, joins Matthew DeMello to examine how leaders can ground AI adoption in clear business value and human-centered operational design. The discussion highlights practical considerations for evaluating AI through its impact on the company, the consumer, and the surrounding workforce community, and the executive education and policy foundations required to move from pilots to reliable enterprise deployment. Emerj works with a select group of AI vendors to reach Fortune 500 decision makers through research, media, and direct access.  If you want to be considered, download our media kit at http://emerj.com/AD1

The rapid shift from seat‑based licensing to hybrid and consumption‑based AI pricing has made technology spend significantly harder for enterprises to predict and control. In this episode, Adam Mansfield, Practice Leader at UpperEdge, examines how these new pricing models create financial exposure for buyers and why clear forecasting, transparency, and leverage are increasingly difficult to secure in negotiations with major vendors, in conversation with host Marilie Fouché. He highlights the practical steps leaders must take now — from auditing current usage and identifying under‑leveraged spend to engaging vendors early and using the broader. This episode is sponsored by UpperEdge. To go deeper into vendor negotiations and learn how to assess AI providers by leadership credibility and funding signals, download our free report, "5 Ways to Select the Right AI Vendor," at emerj.com/aiv3

Enterprise AI initiatives treat design as a finishing step. Carsten Wierwille, Chief Product & Design Officer at HTEC, argues that this is a strategic mistake, and one that explains why so many AI investments produce tools that work technically but fail to change how people actually work. In this episode, Wierwille examines why enterprises keep building AI because they can rather than because they understand the problem, how the shift to AI-assisted ideation has moved the bottleneck from creation to review, and why the answer is not faster shipping but sharper design clarity at the start. The conversation covers the financial advisor as a model for AI force-multiplication, why the MVP framework breaks down for genuinely novel AI experiences, how design now extends to defining the evaluation criteria for AI output, and what Wierwille calls cognitive design, the practice of thinking about how users will perceive, decide, and trust before anyone writes a line of code. This episode is sponsored by HTEC. Learn how brands work with Emerj and other Emerj Media options at go.emerj.com/partner

Computer vision implementations in manufacturing never advance beyond the pilot phase — not because the technology fails, but because deployment is treated as a software problem rather than an operational one. In this episode, Jeff Witt, Digital Transformation Leader at a Fortune 500 global leader in building materials and fiberglass composites, examines the architectural, organizational, and change management decisions that determine whether a vision AI initiative reaches production and scales. The conversation covers how to build a reusable data architecture for vision data, why shifting ownership from IT to business units accelerates deployment, and what a platform mindset — versus a point solution approach — looks like in a multi-site manufacturing environment. This episode is sponsored by Roboflow. Learn how brands work with Emerj and other Emerj Media options at go.emerj.com/partner