Learning curve at the speed of AI
For me, one of the highlights of Dassault Systeme’s annual conference last February, was the presentation and panel discussion by William Roper Junior, when he talked about generative AI being the ninth wonder of the world.
He is an American physicist and foreign policy strategist who oversaw procurement for the US Air Force and Space Force, for a few years, during the Obama and Trump administrations.
Needless to say, I was curious about his observations and views of digital transformation journeys that organisations go through.
There were a lot of insightful ideas during his talk, and at some point he arrived at the topic of learning curves as a measurable of digital transformation.
He had said, “And the last metric that I look for and have seen now in large organisations, is a change in learning curve.
And it’s powerful because it is potentially that capability to build entry-level aircrafts to more advanced aircrafts, for example, all while saving time and money.
“And that’s kind of a harder thing to measure.”
What’s a learning curve in the industrial, production, and maker sector?
These are things like creating proficiency for humans in a given task, or being able to take available digital techniques to change how quickly one can design to a ‘final’ design, or the ability to do greater configuration control using digital models of aircrafts for example, and so on.
And it’s powerful because it is potentially that capability to build entry-level aircrafts to more advanced aircrafts, for example, all while saving time and money.
The Powerful Curve
However, he also called it a digital thread that guides his thinking about where the industry is going, be it for the digital engineering sub-group, the bigger digital transformation, or going after industry4.0, or manufacturing, and more.
There were a lot of insightful ideas during his talk, and at some point he arrived at the topic of learning curves as a measurable of digital transformation.
“I think that this learning curve thread is going to be important for the future the industry, and I think it’s a bigger story than saving time, saving costs and saving environmental impact, as important as those things are.
In closing his talk, he shared about the use of AI in helping Team New Zealand build the fastest sailboat in the world today.
“I think this is a very, very interesting idea – not talked about much, not thought about much but it brings two of these powerful forces in the digitisation of a world, and AI together.”
“And that’s why the learning curve component of digital transformations, I think is the one that’s going to balloon into the big thing.”