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What is a sensible first AI use case for an industrial plant?

Choose a bounded, low-consequence problem with an accountable owner, accessible information and a clear way to compare results with the current process.

What to look for

A starting candidate might be helping staff locate approved documentation for a selected asset group. Another is summarizing a sample of work orders for human review. Before selecting either, verify access, confidentiality and the reliability of source information.

Practical next steps

• Name the user, decision, source information and limits of the proposed tool.
• Agree on how an incorrect answer will be identified and escalated.
• Pilot with a small representative sample and decide in advance what would justify continuing.

Keep AI recommendations subject to human review. Do not use a pilot to bypass operating procedures, isolation controls or engineering approvals.

Choose a task people already need to do

Talk with the intended users and describe the current workflow, its pain and how success is measured. A narrow document-search assistant for an approved asset group may be easier to evaluate than a system that recommends autonomous operational actions. Confirm that source records are current and available to the people who need them.

Define a small pilot

• Name an accountable owner, a limited group of users and the approved information sources.
• Collect representative questions and their expected source documents or acceptable answers.
• Measure task time, useful results, unsupported responses and reviewer effort against a baseline.
• Require human verification and define how to report errors or stop the pilot.
• Review the evidence with frontline users and the responsible data and safety owners before expanding.

For a hypothetical manual-search pilot, a good result is not merely a fluent answer: the user should be able to find and verify the current approved document. Do not use a pilot to authorize maintenance, bypass isolations or override engineering and operating procedures.

Related answer: How do we know whether maintenance data is ready for AI?

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