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12 I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2026 T H E R I G H T A P P ROAC H BY ST E V E W I L L I A M S, T H E R I G H T A P P ROAC H C O N S U LT I N G A bout six years ago, I wrote a series on the Founding Fathers of Quality. With AI taking over the world, I wanted to posit how these quality gurus would apply this technology to their core quality management philosophies. Quality management as a discipline was built by a handful of people who never touched a neural network, yet whose ideas map onto AI with almost eerie precision. Dr. Walter Shewhart, Dr. Edwards Deming, Dr. Joseph Juran, Philip Crosby, Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa, and Shigeo Shingo each built a philos- ophy around a specific lever for improving quality, including statistical rigor, reducing variation, priori- tizing effort, eliminating defects, involving the work- force, and error-proofing the process itself. Rather than AI replacing any of those levers, AI sharpens each one, and imagining how each of these individuals would actually put it to work says as much about their original thinking as it does about the technology. Shewhart: AI Bound by the Scientific Method Shewhart's contribution predates all five of the figures below and quietly underlies each of their frameworks. He invented the control chart itself, and with it the Old Philosophies, New Tools