Industrial Innovation – Gabe Batstone, Co-founder and CEO of contextere – How AI Solutions Can Revolutionize Industry by Improving Safety and Efficiency

Gabe Batstone is the co-founder and CEO of contextere, a software company that solves industry-oriented problems by providing answers, improvement strategies, and optimization via AI powered solutions that focus on human performance. The multifold strategy underlying contextere's advances for business involves increasing value for industry through an escalation in productivity and improved safety, while subsequently reducing any equipment downtime. By integrating data analytics, machine learning, augmented reality, and wearable devices, contextere seeks to improve workflow and increase efficiency.

Batstone holds a bachelor of applied arts specializing in geographic information systems from Ryerson University, Toronto and a masters in business administration from the University of Baltimore. Additionally he has completed postgraduate studies at the United Nations Institute for Training & Research, Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago. He has over twenty years experience in the field of emerging technology in a variety of areas.

Batstone's company's innovation is vital to the industrial workforce involved with the installation, repair, and maintenance of complex equipment. From steel to aerospace, to oil and gas, and smart cities, etc., contextere seeks to make broad and sweeping improvements that will assist industry and aid its workers. As Batstone states, enabling human workers to have digital conversations with complex equipment will assist in their efficiency in the repair and maintenance process. Batstone hopes to see a shift in information delivery. As he discusses, technology tends to reside in the data centers, front offices, and corporate environments, but the intelligence and information from technological data needs to be integrated deeply into the areas where industrial workers are actually able to access it.

The industry innovation CEO discusses the challenges with generational learning differences, for example, as baby boomers may choose to learn by actually reading manuals and textbooks, millennial workers tend to prefer augmented reality, digital, and visual-based learning approaches. Bridging the gaps in learning is often an important part of the equation for industry success.

The contextere CEO explains their goal of providing personal agents to workers that will give them real-time insights as they conduct their daily tasks on the job. Through digital data and alerts, the AI can assist in offering maintenance solutions based on past successes and failures, safety alerts, and so forth, thus keeping the worker more informed and safer, while increasing overall efficiency exponentially.

As Batstone explains, computers are excellent at providing information, but it is still humans that are far superior regarding judgment, in regard to making that assessment on what should be done and how. Batstone details how industry assistance solutions via AI are literally as simple as mobile texting the insightful information to workers to aid them in their tasks. While the future may bring augmented reality glasses and more science-fiction, futuristic looking environments, the current task is to deliver insights from the AI to the workers, to capitalize on efficiency, markedly improve safety, and improve job satisfaction as well. Through cultural transformation, Batstone's company works to advance business systems and processes as technology evolves.