ai product design

The rise of AI-driven modeling tools has some people in manufacturing scrambling to understand the impact of artificial intelligence and wondering how the product design process will change as a result.

Over the past year we have seen in real-time user-friendly AI tools such as ChatGPT from OpenAI and AI image generation from midjourney disrupt the markets for graphic design, web design, and social media content creation. Is product design and manufacturing prototyping the next in line for AI-powered disruption?

Today I'm excited to talk to one of the early founders of AI technology, CEO of Fire&Spark, Dale Bertrand. Dale was a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence research at Brown University where he also trained as an electrical engineer. His experience using AI to solve engineering problems puts him into a unique position to understand how AI design tools for manufactured products might be changing the workflow for design engineers and even the scope of design projects in manufacturing today.

I wanted to get a sense from Dale Bertrand based on his experience both in the AI field and in the engineering field, whether the innovations we are seeing today in generative AI and machine learning have any real bearing on the way products will be designed and manufactured in the future. I started our conversation by listing some of the AI innovations I've seen transform the creative process in other industries, and asking whether these digital products have any bearing on the future of manufacturing.