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108 I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2026 Everyone agrees to this on paper. Yet almost no one does it in practice, because understanding is hard, and inspection is easy. Where AI Shows Up I spent a big chunk of my career on PCB shop floors, and now I spend my days teaching small manufac- turers how to use AI to their greatest benefit. When I walk into a shop that says it is "using AI," nine times out of 10, they mean AI-powered inspection. It's a camera with a smart model behind it that can spot a short or a void faster and more accurately than a person with an eye loupe. That is real, and it is good. If you can catch more defects with fewer false calls, you should. But that machine is simply a better inspector, sitting at the end of the line, finding problems after they have been created. It is Deming's bad approach, done faster. The more valuable use of AI is further upstream, and it does not look like a camera. The Real Problem Is Not the Defect Defect data lives in multiple places. The AOI sys- tem logs one thing. ERP has its own specific scrap code. First shift keeps a spreadsheet. The second shift may keep a different one, and the plating lead keeps a notebook that never leaves the plating room. One writes "misregistration," another writes "layer shift." A third writes "registration out" while a fourth writes "reg" and a number. A fifth does not write anything because the traveler was wet. These are four "names" for what is almost certainly the same problem. However, your computer only sees four separate defects with small counts, and none of them look like a big deal, so nobody chases it. Meanwhile, the total might be the biggest quality problem in the building, which remains hidden because four different people used different words. A language model earns its keep because it's very good at reading messy human text and saying, in effect, that these four terms appear to describe the same thing. The model can read the logs, spread- sheets, and notebooks once someone photographs the pages, and puts it all into one table with one set of names—a consistent data reference. Nothing magical happens in that step. No robot fixes the press. But for the first time, an engineer can see the whole pattern and ask the right ques- tion: Why does X happen only on the eight-layer jobs, and why did its occurrence double in March? "Seeing the whole system" means getting all the evidence into one place where a human can look at it. AI Organizes, Humans Make the Call The engineer decides the root cause, not AI. There was once a case in which researchers used AI to read a pile of engineering notes and failure reports.