Real AI Tools for Fastener Distributors
2024 is flying by and we are still under a deluge of articles and discussion about artificial intelligence. There’s no shortage of hype for this technology, but what can we actually purchase? I gave a talk on this issue at Fastener Fair earlier this year, called “AI tools for Fastener Distributors.” As distributors within the fastener space, what can we actually purchase, today, for under a million dollars, that we can use at our shops?
Before we get to that, I want to talk about what I consider are the two, possibly three, different kinds of artificial intelligence. The first is generative AI and this is what has been in the news lately, the type of artificial intelligence that can generate text, or answer questions, or make pictures. The second type is neural networks, a kind of machine learning where they are generally engineered to solve a particular problem. A classic example of this is the US Postal Service recognizing handwritten zip codes using trained neural networks. You give them a million examples, and it can decipher what a “7” looks like, even though your handwriting is horrible. And the last kind of artificial intelligence, and this is a stretch, is what I consider to be “Fake AI”. What I mean by this is there are plenty of things in computing where you have an algorithm that uses regular math and statistics and has been around for decades, yet suddenly it is being marketed as artificial intelligence. As someone with an engineering background who wrote my first language models and neural network processing code over 30 years ago, I have a high bar for what should be called AI, but I think it’s fair to say there’s certainly a lot of products out there suddenly using this term, that don’t classify.