Industry
Manufacturing
8 pieces on The Craft of AI tagged with Manufacturing — across The Brief, the Failure Museum, and the Playbooks.
The Brief — 4 issues
Pella's AI Reads Twenty Years of Maintenance History. Lean Would Have Deleted It.
Almost every window Pella builds is different from the one before it, and for years the discipline that kept its plants efficient also kept them from writing anything down. Adding the record-keeping back was the unpopular decision that made everything after it possible, and the AI came last, not first.
Travis Turnbull, Pella Corporation · Private (not disclosed)
Most CEOs Buy AI Licenses. WD-40 Bought Operating Margin.
Steve Brass spent 31 years inside WD-40 before taking the CEO seat in September 2022. He took a public position on the customer outcome the company had been failing — and the work he refused to keep imposing on his planners — before he procured a single AI tool. The licenses were the same. The order was different. The receipt is 100 basis points of gross margin expansion in Q2 fiscal 2026.
Steve Brass, WD-40 Company · $590M (FY2025)
Randy Wood Is Turning a 70-Year-Old Sprinkler Company Into a Subscription Business — Because a Broken Gearbox in July Is a Farmer Who Doesn't Call in November
A $620M irrigation equipment maker in Omaha is quietly pivoting to Tech-as-a-Service — and the reason isn't recurring revenue. It's that the AI earns its keep preventing the one service call that loses you the customer.
Randy Wood, Lindsay Corporation · $620M (FY2026 annualized)
Rehrig Pacific's AI Read 14,000 Pages of Its Own Binders Before It Ever Talked to a Customer
A 112-year-old plastics manufacturer in Los Angeles made the contrarian first AI move of 2025.
Will Rehrig, Rehrig Pacific · ~$410M
Operator Playbooks — 2 guides
Predictive Maintenance That Actually Works
Lindsay Corporation built it on the failure that cost them the customer. GE built it on the failure that was easiest to model. One business now has an $80M MENA subscription deal. The other one wrote down $22 billion.
Where to Put AI First
A decision framework for the operating leader at a small-cap or mid-cap company picking the one place AI should go before anywhere else — and why most operators pick the wrong one.
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