AI for Engineers

“I am a firm believer that as a company we should keep throwing sparks into the organisation, see what takes fire and then keep feeding it. You never know what might turn around.

“This philosophy has prompted us to set up a Future Technologies team. This team is exploring many areas including green technologies, different engineering and manufacturing techniques, as well as software applications. That naturally led us down the path towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) some time ago.”

“We have a broad range of people who work for us, from a broad range of backgrounds. Some are very technical who like to push and probe in the detail to gain more understanding, while others are not so technical and take a more holistic approach. We needed a trainer who was very good at moving round a subject, working out who knew what and what they wanted to get out of the course. That person is very much Ali Parandeh. He is the trainer the IMechE use for AI and is an expert in the field. He is exceptional.

“We wanted Ali to come to us at our head office in Derby, rather than our delegates going to a standard course elsewhere. It helps that Ali has a background in Engineering, including the railway sector. We wanted everyone to be able to talk freely and for anything that was discussed to remain confidential. So, we worked with the Institution and Ali to devise a course just for our company.”

“Some of the maths was quite hard going and there was some heavy statistical mathematical modelling. It certainly helped to have a mathematical, engineering or technical capability to stay engaged for that part.

“However, we also looked at the approaches AI developers have taken so far, some of the applications typically available, how the large language models develop, neural networks and more. By the time we’d been through all that content, our creative juices were flowing.

“We asked ourselves: ‘How could we use this? Is there an opportunity here? Can I develop something that I can sell, or could I use this to make something easier for me?’ A good starting point for us was to consider the laborious time-consuming processes in our business. Potentially, AI is very good at offering options to automate or improve those types of activity.”

1) “The IMechE has a well-earned reputation of delivering high-quality courses and we have personal experience of the truth of that.”
2) “The trainer helped us understand where the value would be for our company. For example, would a particular AI project be something that we can use and push out of the sales door, or would we be spending months developing something that would just save us 30 seconds of work.”
3) “AI is capable of so much, it can sometimes seem overwhelming. The trainer offered clarity and was very good at helping us consider, ‘How could this be applied to our company and to our industry?’”

“Without the context and the technical understanding of AI that Ali taught us, I almost feel we wouldn’t have been able to see the wood for the trees. We are much closer to understanding the art of the possible and how we can add value for ourselves and our customers.

“We’re an organisation that looks to continuously improve. This training has helped us identify further options and areas where we can do this; whether that is what we can offer customers or how we do things internally. The course has allowed us to streamline what we want to look at in the first instance. At the end of the day, we’re a consultancy – our greatest asset is our people and knowledge. We need to keep feeding our colleagues and, when we feed them with a course like this, ideas come out. And that’s what makes us a successful business.”

“We have brilliant people with exceptional ideas, and we are very good at collaboration and partnerships. So, we haven’t put an ROI on this course – you could see it as a way of capturing ideas within the organisation. And we have captured dozens and dozens of ideas.

“For now, we’ve pulled together a shortlist to create a manageable number of topics for further investigation. We are thinking about which ones are the most impactful and which ones are low-hanging fruit. We are putting that into our Future Technologies team to take forward.

“We are also in discussions with the IMechE about running another course and perhaps some more in-depth training. There’s more to come.”