Is experience underestimated in the age of AI?
by Co-founder
We keep hearing about how AI will transform processes across the sectors — be it engineering, manufacturing, recruitment, services, etc.
This may well be so, as AI can analyse enormous amounts of data, identify patterns, compare options and assist with decisions.
Where does this leave the value of experience?
Having spent many years around manufacturing, engineering and businesses, I feel that some of the most valuable knowledge in an organisation is not necessarily documented anywhere.
- A process engineer may know that a particular operating condition "usually" works — but also know from experience when it is likely to fail.
- A maintenance engineer may recognise a machine problem from a sound or vibration pattern long before the data becomes conclusive.
- A plant manager may know that a seemingly attractive solution will create three other problems downstream.
- A salesperson may know that a technically excellent proposal is unlikely to work because they understand the customer's organisation and decision-making process.
- Similarly, an experienced recruiter may look at two CVs that appear almost identical and recognise that one candidate is much more likely to succeed in the particular context.
AI can perhaps do a great job with what has been captured — log sheets, data, reports, historical records, etc. But a lot of industrial experience is contextual. It comes from having seen things go wrong. It comes from having made decisions with incomplete information. It comes from knowing which assumptions are safe and which ones can be challenged. It comes from understanding that the technically optimal answer isn't always the practically implementable one.
AI could certainly add value to the experience, by identifying patterns from mining the data quickly, but there is perhaps no substitute for human judgement.
Are we doing enough to capture experience?
This leads to a broader question: as organisations become more digital and AI-enabled, are we doing enough to capture and retain the experience of the people who built the organisation?
When an experienced person retires or leaves, the company can lose thousands of small decisions, lessons, shortcuts, warnings and insights that may never have made it into a manual.
The opportunity, therefore, is not to choose between AI and experience, but to bring them together to magnify the value of experience.