At IMTS Chicago this month, Honeywell CTO Mehul Patel made a prediction worth remembering: as trust in AI builds and these new processes become normal, the talk around AI and its capabilities will eventually stop.
That sounds like a strange thing to look forward to, until you think about what it actually means. Nobody holds a panel discussion about whether email works. Nobody writes a LinkedIn post about the transformative potential of spreadsheets. Those tools won the argument so completely that the argument stopped happening — the technology disappeared into the infrastructure, and only the outcomes are visible now.
That’s the actual finish line for AI in manufacturing, and it’s not a dramatic one. It’s not a headline about a plant that “transformed” overnight. It’s the quiet version — a forecasting tool nobody mentions in meetings anymore because it’s just how forecasting is done now, a maintenance alert that stopped being a talking point the day it stopped being wrong.
Here’s what that means for anyone still deciding whether to start: the endpoint isn’t “become an AI company.” It’s “stop noticing the AI.” Every rollout that’s still generating excitement, demos, and press releases is, by definition, not there yet. The ones that quietly won are the ones nobody’s writing about — because winning looked like disappearing into the process, not standing out from it.
So what — is your team still treating AI as a topic to discuss, or has any part of it actually gone quiet and just become “how we work now”? Now what — what’s one AI-assisted process you could stop talking about, because it’s simply become standard practice?
Source: Manufacturing Dive, “‘We’re going to stop talking about AI,’ and other industrial predictions” (IMTS Chicago)
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