Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) West 2026 kicked off its first day yesterday, hosting more than 1,700 exhibitors spread over 319,000 sq.ft. of show floor space at the Anaheim Convention center in southern California.
Guidewheel founder and CEO, Lauren Dunford, opened for the show with her keynote: AI Without the Hype: Real Results in Manufacturing. While her presentation touched a number of AI myths and realities, at the crux of her presentation lay the assertion that AI in manufacturing acts an amplifier of manufacturers’ operations. Whether that amplification produces a good or bad result, however, depends on the solidity of the company’s data foundation.
“For years, we’ve said garbage in, garbage out. With AI, it’s actually garbage in, poison out,” Dunford cautioned. “If you’re starting with bad information, AI will potentially come out with a very wrong but very confident direction for you to go in.”
Ultimately, she added, without a solid data strategy in place first, it doesn’t matter what AI strategy manufacturers adopt. With a solid strategy, Dunford said AI begins to live up to its full potential.
“If we want to avoid garbage in, poison out, then we want to think about what’s the opposite,” she said. “How can we think about carbon in, diamonds out; diamonds being the right insight and the right guidance at the right time.”
Moving away from garbage/poison and toward carbon/diamonds begins with starting from the desired end result, she said, and working backward to discover the data granularity required. In addition, she recommends that manufacturers collect data as close to the source as possible.
However, Dunford warned that an AI solution should never be plugged directly into a PLC. The only other component all industrial equipment share, no matter their age or sophistication, is the power they draw to operate.
That’s where Guidewheel enters the picture. The company’s non-invasive clip-on sensors wrap around the power cables of industrial equipment, like a smart watch, to monitor and collect electric current data in real time. From the fluctuations in power draw, combined with other sensor input (temperature, vibration, etc), Guidewheel’s FactorOps software catalogs downtime and spots patterns equipment availability and performance.
