Practical AI for Manufacturers: Why Most AI Tools Solve the Wrong Problem

Dave Crysler welcomes back Damon Pistulka, co-founder of Exit Your Way, to cut through the noise around AI in small and mid-market businesses. Damon downloaded and tested more than 50 AI tools before landing on what actually changes an operation, and it wasn’t any of the apps filling his Instagram feed. The two get into where AI genuinely expands what a business can do, where it is flat out the wrong tool, and why the lever points in your operation haven’t changed in decades even though the toolset has.

What You’ll Discover:

• Why testing 50 AI tools led Damon to conclude most of them solve a real problem, just not the owner’s problem
• The difference between making a process faster and making a process possible, and why only one of those changes the business
• Why you need someone inside the business who can imagine the solution before you hire anyone to build it
• The long term maintenance and operating costs almost nobody puts in the business case, including real monthly numbers on AI voice systems
• How the old lean question, what would we have to solve to get there, applies directly to AI projects
• What a workflow system does that your ERP does not, and why the two work best side by side
• The two things you find every single time you look closely at how the work actually gets done
• Where AI is the wrong tool, and what to reach for instead when the numbers have to be exact
• Why speed, not features, is still how businesses win
• How to keep an AI project from eating hours without producing anything

If you have been told AI will change your business but nobody can tell you where to start, this conversation gives you the filter. Start with the constraints that have been holding you back for years, then ask what it would take to solve them now. The tools changed. The question didn’t.