Trailblazing AI for Manufacturing

At Mountain Point, we envision a future where AI empowers our professional services to deliver unparalleled excellence, innovation, and value to our clients.

All of this is a current brain dump to help everyone understand where things are heading and to solicit the team's inputs into thinking outside the box into how we can take advantage of this fast moving wave of technology.

Harnessing the power of cutting-edge AI technology, we strive to transform the way we approach problem-solving, decision-making, and client engagement, elevating our services to new heights. 

As leaders in our industry, we embrace AI as a catalyst for growth and continuous improvement, ensuring that we stay at the forefront of emerging trends and deliver tailored, data-driven solutions that drive success for our clients and stakeholders. 

Together, we are forging a new era of professional services, fueled by the limitless potential of artificial intelligence.   

Trailblazing AI for Manufacturing!

Base Camp:

Connecting the Dots: 

OpenAI is harnessing the power of deep learning to create generative models, utilizing vast quantities of data to train AI systems for various tasks. ChatGPT and other similar models are being refined and updated frequently, sometimes even on a weekly basis.

These models offer a user-friendly experience, allowing easy interaction through web browsers. However, their true potential unfolds when they are integrated with specific data sources, such as CSV files, PDFs, databases, and APIs, and trained accordingly with the right algorithms.

Toni Baker will be our guiding force in exploring the advanced capabilities of these models. She has recently completed a six-week, instructor-led course titled "Unlock the Power of AI: Build a ChatGPT Chatbot For Your Data." 

Toni is navigating the challenges of training AI models with targeted datasets (along with guidance and support from Skye and Julie), and she’ll soon be prepared to share her knowledge with the team - ideally at some upcoming Tech Talks!

By empowering others to identify valuable use cases within their work-streams, I’m hopeful we’ll be able to work smarter and deliver more value.

Putting it into action at Mountain Point

The initial use cases we’ve identified at Mountain Point include, but not limited to;

• Marketing - assisted content and media creation.  Holland and Marina will be taking the charge here to help drive the success stories and solution shorts.  As well as making sure we are being agile to adapt to priorities we are hearing from Sales as it relates to certain products or use cases.

• Example:

  • ChatGPT Assisted thought piece on “Harness the Power of Salesforce Experience Cloud: Elevate Customer Experiences and Self-Service Solutions”

  • Customer Success story on Idaho Forest Group (IFG) and how they are leveraging Experience Cloud

  • Solution Short(s): Demonstrating the solutions and use cases we solved for leveraging the experience cloud community (YouTube)

  • Testimonial: CSAT / Brief paragraph or quote on why MP

  • Call to Action to learn more or subscribe to our newsletter that will continue to highlight and feature things like this

• Sales 

  • BDR/SDR assistance

    • Co-selling with Salesforce requires industry and subject matter expertise to craft the right messaging to existing and prospective customers to hit the at the right time with the right content on the right channel.

    • Our sales team will be able to use a framework we put in place to create prospect dossiers pulling publicly available information on an Account and identifying areas of opportunity to have meaningful conversations with them

  • Marketing content

    • Sales will also be able to have multiple arrows in the quiver as outlined in the section above to be able to quickly identify pieces of relevant content to share MP’s expertise around industry solutions for Manufacturing

• Project Management

  • Lots of time is wasted within meetings and then identifying the next steps and action items and getting everyone aligned on that

    • MP will begin recording all permissible meetings and leveraging the Zoom transcripts to have AI assist PMs in summarizing meetings and putting together action plans

  • More use cases TBD

• Solutions Architects

  • Tons of time is spent in upfront discoveries, then Solution Design documents, etc…

    • The future of this role is to >10x  their outputs by leveraging a combination of AI and on/off-shore BA / Admin / Dev talent

    • To accomplish this I want our team to experiment with how design documentation can be converted into actionable recipes for this leveraged talent to execute on

    • Example:  

      • Solution Design Document -> ChatGPT -> Build document

      • Build document -> ChatGPT -> Test scripts

      • Test Scripts -> ChatGPT -> Training documentation

  • The same will go for any custom development that needs to happen

    • Example:

      • Pseudo code -> ChatGPT -> Apex code

      • Apex code -> ChatGPT -> Test classes

These are just some initial examples we are beginning to explore and I’m confident these will evolve and generate ideas for more and more use cases.

Bringing our customers along for the journey:

Training the Data: 

Our first client seeking to embark on this journey with us is Service Pump and Supply (SPS).  SPS runs their entire business on the Salesforce platform. This will allow us to not have to worry about multiple data sets and API integrations and work with a close customer to learn together how we can bring their data to life.  

Our initial goal is to begin with the following:

• Pump Repairs: Take 5 years of historical pump repair data, train the model and be able to engage with it to help their repair shop generate more accurate quotes and reduce pump repair times.

• Next best actions:  The ultimate goal is to identify the appropriate model(s) and algorithm(s) to be leveraged (More on that here) so that we can begin creating a customer specific chatbot that allows all divisions within the business to ask it questions and get simple answers. [Manufacturing Client Name - GPT]!

Risks: 

• Salesforce as a platform is already working on this (EinsteinGPT)

  • So in theory all of the above could be perceived as wasted energy if SF will eventually roll out products and features that accomplish all of this

• I personally don’t view this as a risk, but as an opportunity for Mountain Point to lean in fast to further differentiate ourselves and chart a new path for delivering value to our customers

Grand Vision:

This leads me to the grand vision of where I think all of this is heading.  The value of Mountain Point to differentiate ourselves in the Salesforce for Manufacturing ecosystem already exists with Rootstock and furthermore by what we are doing with Logik.io / CPQ, Visualization with CDS and our work in Field Service (FSL) and Experience Cloud.  We will continue to double down on this!

In addition to this I think the ability to start having AI conversations and more importantly show how we are leveraging it will also be a differentiating factor.

• Mountain Point - Salesforce for Manufacturing Partner of Choice

  • Sr. PMs and Consultants

  • Architects and Product SMEs

  • Business Analysts (BAs)

  • Leveraging AI, CentralApp and Offshore to 10x our outputs

• CentralApp - Closing the apprenticeship gap and generating virtual, high-paying, opportunities to underserved communities across Appalachia. 

  • BAs and Admins

    • Building what SAs design

  • Future state, also build out a talent pool of  “Prompt Engineers” 

    • where companies all over can tap into leveraging AI by offloading time consuming tasks

      • i.e. Manufacturing company that wants to outsource the copywriting

      • Data cleansing

• XG Analytics - Productizing MFG-GPT.  A combination of product/services to deploy, train, and take action on manufacturers data.

  • The learnings and execution from all of the above are going to help us drive to a more definitive business model for XGA and where we take it!

We will continue to document and update this as we go!  

More to come!