How is AI being used in your company/Industry?

[u/People_Peace]

Outside world and industries like C.S., Finance, Real estate, Event artists/graphics designers etc the conversation is all around AI usage, AI threat, AI startup etc. How is AI being in used in Major Chemical industries? Oil Gas, Chemicals, Pulp paper, Power, Food, Pharmaceuticals ? etc.

This group is eerily silence about AI talks. Would like to learn some perspective.

[u/drdessertlover]

MBAs and directors push to use it to revolutionize our industry. Engineers and people who do stuff know it is all BS and use it to write emails to shut the "leadership" up.

[u/DetailOk3452 → u/drdessertlover]

So truely put!!!!!

[u/lilithweatherwax]

For coding here and there, but not much otherwise. 

Fwiw, my workplace hasn't been pushing it on us much at all. Most of the AI-related communication is concerned with making sure that we aren't feeding proprietary/sensitive information into it.

[u/shr3dthegnarbrah]

People who dont have anything to add to a discussion chime in with:

"I typed in [current topic of conversation] into chatgpt and it gave this:

Wikipedia definition

Coldest possible take on the subject

Top three google search results but in the form of a paragraph"

(Look at me, I'm so current year)

[u/uniballing]

I used AI to draw a cartoon of my Ops Manager riding in a Kei truck. Trying to convince him to replace our UTVs with Kei trucks that have A/C

I also taught all of my maintenance coordinators how to use it to class up their emails. They just type all of the profanity they want and Copilot takes it out and makes it classy

[u/People_Peace → u/uniballing]

I would like to see before and after emails.

[u/CananDamascus]

Nothing official being pushed down from above in my company which is nice. I use it to troubleshoot process controls issues and learn about engineering topics im less familiar with. But I wouldn't use it to do any actual engineering work.

[u/East-Clock682]

To make figures for PowerPoint presentations

[u/lraz_actual]

AI has caused failures, or lead to the decisions that caused them. Therefore, it is out.

[u/Wild-Issue1893]

I have no background in engineering. I have a mushroom farm, and I love drinking mushroom infused coffee. I wanted to make my own specialty arabica Whole bean mushroom infused coffee. Working with a local roaster, I found out what profile of process and space would fit in their production without disrupting their flow. I put the information into ChatGPT, learned about fluidized bed drying, spray drying, vacuum retorts, ISO 9000 certification.

3 months and $1,500 in equipment later I have a device that can infuse 2.6 L of tincture onto 40# of coffee without degrading the quality of the beans or the potency of the extract. It can do 40# of beans every 10 minutes, and is semi-automatic. Pretty sweet. Conceptually and technically it’s all chatGPT, I just gave it some parameters, it gave me a parts list.

[u/EvenJesusCantSaveYou → u/Wild-Issue1893]

hey thats pretty neat

[u/Elrohwen]

Trying to get it to respond to signals in a manufacturing environment and finding out that people are still better at it

[u/diet69dr420pepper]

About this group's silence, I would say that there is a big gap between the number of people who use LLMs and the number of people who happily profess to using LLMs. In technical fields, it is embarrassing to say you outsource any of your cognition. Everyone senses this stigma so it is in everyone's best interest to smile and nod while the most passionate opponent's riff about the uselessness/dangerousness/immorality of "AI."

[u/topflipflop → u/diet69dr420pepper]

Are you speaking for yourself or just everyone else?

[u/diet69dr420pepper → u/topflipflop]

Yes. Most conversations about "AI" in industry and academia are negative or dismissive, but simultaneously most people are at least occasionally asking ChatGPT to first-draft emails, write some code, scan large documents for key pieces of info, etc.. The usage picks up as people give it a chance and realize how much time and effort it can save. There is a definite disconnect between the way people are behaving versus what they're saying.

[u/hysys_whisperer]

There's some stuff around the edges, like report generation and such, also reactive monitoring around individual equipment performance.  I'd be more worried if I were a reliability engineer or an energy focal point.

[u/HighPlainsSchwifter]

Largely being utilized to synthesize turnaround memes

[u/twostroke1]

It would be a cold day in hell before we let “AI” touch our manufacturing systems in the pharma world.

[u/magillaknowsyou]

Great for turning a PO into something I can paste into my Excel template but beyond that not much.

[u/Fantastic_Trouble214]

I use LLM's research mode to get list of relevant published patents and papers. I find it extremely time saving - as I don't have to spend hours myself.

I use LLM to find whether this formula is in Perry or Coleson etc.

[u/DetailOk3452]

I use ai to generate copyright free pictures or to make me understand a new concept. But for my process engg work. I only trust excel and my casio calculator

[u/MrRzepa2]

Some time ago company we work with uploaded a model of their scope with levitating forklifts so my collegue made copilot draw a picture of forklifts flying above the plant. Sadly Microsoft restricted copilot to one picture per day so we mostly make memes trafitionally in paint. But I have a picture bdsm heat echxanger in full leather and whip (don't ask) that otherwise would require me to learn how to draw.

Otherwise deepl for translations (when it comes to technical language even it is not the best), some people use it for emails and nothing really serious. I know my bosses wanted to test some ai for generating documents to asses if company using them could undercut us. My opinion is that it won't really help us as parts that ai can help us write are typically already copied from ones we made earlier and have to verified anyway. Nevertheless I think there is some brainstorming on what can we use it for but it's mostly focused how to cut the non engineering work so we would have more time to do it.

[u/rolandoq]

LLMs’ best use so far is being context aware search engines. They are also useful if you want to organise or tabulate data. That is about it til now.

I do see a lot of potential in browsers with built-in LLMs. Workflow automation in web apps through “browser macros” is going to be a big one for time savings.