Industrial Innovation – Gabe Batstone, Co-founder and CEO of contextere – How AI Solutions Can Revolutionize Industry by Improving Safety and Efficiency
Finding Genius Podcast
Richard Jacobs
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Gabe Batstone is the co-founder and CEO of contextere, a software company that solves industry-oriented problems by providing answers, improvement strategies, and optimization via AI powered solutions that focus on human performance. The multifold strategy underlying contextere's advances for business involves increasing value for industry through an escalation in productivity and improved safety, while subsequently reducing any equipment downtime. By integrating data analytics, machine learning, augmented reality, and wearable devices, contextere seeks to improve workflow and increase efficiency.
Batstone holds a bachelor of applied arts specializing in geographic information systems from Ryerson University, Toronto and a masters in business administration from the University of Baltimore. Additionally he has completed postgraduate studies at the United Nations Institute for Training & Research, Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago. He has over twenty years experience in the field of emerging technology in a variety of areas.
Batstone's company's innovation is vital to the industrial workforce involved with the installation, repair, and maintenance of complex equipment. From steel to aerospace, to oil and gas, and smart cities, etc., contextere seeks to make broad and sweeping improvements that will assist industry and aid its workers. As Batstone states, enabling human workers to have digital conversations with complex equipment will assist in their efficiency in the repair and maintenance process. Batstone hopes to see a shift in information delivery. As he discusses, technology tends to reside in the data centers, front offices, and corporate environments, but the intelligence and information from technological data needs to be integrated deeply into the areas where industrial workers are actually able to access it.
The industry innovation CEO discusses the challenges with generational learning differences, for example, as baby boomers may choose to learn by actually reading manuals and textbooks, millennial workers tend to prefer augmented reality, digital, and visual-based learning approaches. Bridging the gaps in learning is often an important part of the equation for industry success.
The contextere CEO explains their goal of providing personal agents to workers that will give them real-time insights as they conduct their daily tasks on the job. Through digital data and alerts, the AI can assist in offering maintenance solutions based on past successes and failures, safety alerts, and so forth, thus keeping the worker more informed and safer, while increasing overall efficiency exponentially.
As Batstone explains, computers are excellent at providing information, but it is still humans that are far superior regarding judgment, in regard to making that assessment on what should be done and how. Batstone details how industry assistance solutions via AI are literally as simple as mobile texting the insightful information to workers to aid them in their tasks. While the future may bring augmented reality glasses and more science-fiction, futuristic looking environments, the current task is to deliver insights from the AI to the workers, to capitalize on efficiency, markedly improve safety, and improve job satisfaction as well. Through cultural transformation, Batstone's company works to advance business systems and processes as technology evolves.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Almost Here, Around the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs. |
| 0:07.0 | Future Technologies hoists to transform our lives for better or worse or the focus of this podcast. |
| 0:13.0 | Almost here means these technologies are now here and starting to be used. |
| 0:17.0 | Or just around the corner, for Bitcoin to artificial intelligence, |
| 0:21.0 | 3D printing, blockchain, virtual reality, and more. |
| 0:25.0 | Hello this is Richard Jacobs with the Future Tech Podcast. My guest today is Gabe |
| 0:31.5 | Batstone from Context There. |
| 0:34.0 | Website is C-O-N-T-E-E-R-E. |
| 0:38.0 | We're talking about AI. |
| 0:40.0 | So, Gabe, how you doing today? |
| 0:42.0 | Great, thanks so much for having me. |
| 0:44.0 | Appreciate taking a bit of your time. |
| 0:45.0 | Yeah, tell me about Contextair. What do you guys do? |
| 0:48.0 | You know, at Contextair, it's a |
| 0:51.0 | everyday we wake up focused on transforming the future of work |
| 0:55.1 | you know and that's a pretty broad statement but the future of work from our |
| 0:58.9 | context is we see a role in being able to provide actionable intelligence to that last tactical mile, |
| 1:06.0 | which is, I would say, where people put warm hands on cold steel, they install, they maintain, |
| 1:11.7 | they repair, they operate complex equipment. |
| 1:14.8 | And that's the kind of stuff that makes our cities run. |
| 1:18.0 | And when I say actionable, really I would translate that into, in context know you're getting intelligence without it being in context isn't is an actionable and and the last tactical mile in that description really refers to our obsession with enriching the work |
| 1:33.8 | environment of blue-collar workers in specific. Well when you say all right what |
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