JUNE 2025AEROSPACEDEFENSEREVIEW.COM8In My OpinionBy Paul Guerrier, Manufacturing Engineering Manager, MoogAN OPERATOR WALKS UP TO A MACHINE TOOLPerhaps one of my favorite jokes is "A horse walks into a bar," pause for dramatic effect, "Why the long face?"It is a great joke for so many reasons, coworker-friendly and kid-friendly being chief among them.A few months ago, I heard a vision of the future that reminded me of this joke. In this vision, "An Operator Walks up to a Machine Tool..." Once at the equipment interface, they then start to have a conversation with the equipment about today's schedule, how the current job for Customer X is going, if any G-code changes might be needed, how all of the 100 cutting tools are doing, and other work-related topics. At first, I frankly didn't see the vision. Amazon's Alexa is neat, but fairly often, you find yourself pretty frustrated, shouting at the device, wondering why it refuses to play the specific podcast/music you requested or, in a worse case, ordering something online for which you have no need.More recently, we started to investigate the benefits of Generative AI here at Moog Inc. It turns out that I now consider my initial reaction to be wrong (and, yes, just like everyone else, I am still getting used to the feeling). My understanding of the relevant technology, as well as the likely timescale, was incorrect. As I started to work with Generative AI here at Moog, I also started to read and watch blog posts, articles, and breathless YouTube videos. A great multitude of information was a few clicks away.Based on experiences at Moog so far, using gigantic neural networks hosted on a cloud server to help with everyday manufacturing tasks really does seem within reach. As an example, you can ask (prompt) many of the currently available tools to create G-code for a simple geometry and receive a response. You can also ask (prompt) to understand G-code that you are unfamiliar with and receive a response. You can upload a section of computer code, like Python, and ask (prompt) for an optimization or comments to be added. A few seconds later, the response is returned. It is also possible to "have a conversation with a document" via a method named retrieval augmented generation (RAG). You ask natural language questions and get responses that are based on the document that you loaded. This is very different from a find or a keyword search.Paul GuerrierNeat stuff for sure, but why was I wrong on the timescale? The reasons, in approximate order of importance, are below.· Already built infrastructure· Capital investment· A strong desire within aerospace to improve· Workforce changeThanks to the internet, personal computing, and mobile computing, networking and computational resources are currently available. While we are likely to need more, the basics are already in place. As with most technological changes, it will be expensive. But capital investment is in place, and startups working hard to make a dent are currently plentiful.
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