About this episode

Naresh Mehta discusses the challenges and pitfalls of manufacturing AI projects and shares insights from his extensive experience in the field.

🎙️ Why 90% of Manufacturing POCs Die with Naresh Mehta After 20+ years building enterprise tech for global manufacturers across India, Mexico, and the US, Naresh Mehta has lived through every wave from Excel dashboards to digital twins to agentic AI to physical AI. In this conversation, he gets blunt about why most manufacturing AI projects never make it to production, names a brand new trap nobody is talking about (intelligence silos), and walks through two real deployments that prove what works when you stop chasing the model and start respecting the plumbing. We get into a real agentic AI build that automated 65% of supplier risk monitoring at an industrial conglomerate (200+ risk parameters, 8 multi-agent workflows, 20+ back office roles redeployed instead of fired), an auto OEM physical AI build that cut defect rates 25 to 30% by shifting inspection left with situationally aware robots, where quantum actually fits before manufacturing leaders even start asking, why every enterprise needs an AI control plane (and why the database-deletion horror stories happen without one), and what to tell the AI curious, the AI enthusiast, and the AI skeptic. In this episode: 00:00 Cold…

People in this episode

Host: Dave Goyal

Guest: Naresh Mehta

Topics covered

• manufacturing AI
• POC challenges
• intelligence silos
• real deployments
• supplier risk monitoring
• defect rate reduction
• AI adoption

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Think AI Podcast

Products: Excel dashboards, digital twins, agentic AI, physical AI

Places: India, Mexico, US

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