{
  "id": 6750549,
  "title": "Squint’s Founder Turns Factory Know-How Into AI’s Starting Point",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/11/squints-founder-turns-factory-know-how-into-ais-starting-point",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-09-11T11:00:45.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "PYMNTS",
    "slug": "pymnts",
    "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2026/squints-founder-turns-factory-know-how-into-ais-starting-point/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Devin Bhushan, founder and CEO of Squint, is working to transform tacit expertise found in factory settings into a structured, machine-readable format. While factory knowledge often exists only in the minds of veteran technicians, Squint aims to capture and utilize this knowledge through AI. Before starting the company, Bhushan encountered numerous instances where factory processes remained undocumented, making it impossible for AI to assist with them. Squint addresses this challenge by building a \"context layer\" – a structured record of how work gets done – using video footage, informal documentation, and data from the factory's ERP and maintenance systems. Each customer receives its own context layer, tailored to their proprietary processes. Bhushan highlights Pepsi as a customer with highly specific recipes that cannot be generalized across manufacturers. Once the context layer is established, Squint employs agents to analyze work and identify inefficiencies. The Lean Manufacturing Agent, for instance, transforms traditional stopwatch-and-clipboard time studies into a fast, video-based analysis of work cycles, classifying each second as value-added, necessary, or waste and providing targeted recommendations for optimization. Squint's agents can also create safety briefings, diagnose forklift problems, and facilitate rapid changeovers between product lines. These agents have reportedly helped customers reduce scrap rates by up to 50% and decrease training time for new processes. Bhushan envisions longer-term applications, such as the ability for factories to rapidly shift production from one product to another based solely on raw material availability. By bridging the gap between tacit factory knowledge and AI capabilities, Squint aims to enhance manufacturing flexibility and responsiveness to market demand.",
  "summary": "Ask a veteran factory technician how to fix a machine that’s acting up, and the answer might sound less like an engineering manual and more like folklore: if it smells like this, hit it three times on the left side and it comes back to life. That kind of knowledge never gets written down. It […] The post Squint’s Founder Turns Factory Know-How Into AI’s Starting Point appeared first on PYMNTS.com…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}