The Real Threat to Tribal Knowledge Isn't Just Retirement w/ Jamie Marzilli

Speaker A: Foreign welcome to the Manufacturing Executive Podcast where we explore the strategies and experiences that are driving mid sized manufacturers forward. Here you'll discover new insights from passionate manufacturing leaders who have compelling stories to share about their successes and struggles. And you'll learn from B2B sales and marketing experts about how to apply actionable business development strategies inside your business. Let's get into the Show.

Speaker B: Welcome to another episode of the Manufacturing Executive Podcast. I'm Joe Sullivan, your host and a co founder of the industrial marketing agency Guerrilla 76. For well over a decade we've been helping OEMs, machine builders, contract manufacturers, robotic systems integrators and Industry 4.0 technology companies strategize and implement revenue focused marketing programs. So many of these companies have built amazing businesses over the years and sometimes over multiple generations through relationships, referrals, repeat business, trade shows and knocking on doors. But for many, what got them where they are today is unlikely to get them where they want to go in the years ahead. The reality is this the way their prospects and customers collect product information, vet potential solution providers and conduct their buying processes is is completely different now than it was even five or ten years ago. Our team of industrial marketers at Gorilla 76 has collectively advised well over 200 B2B manufacturing leaders. We've seen time and time again what's working and what's not, and we bring that outside perspective to our clients to help them build the modern marketing programs they need to remain competitive and continue on a growth trajectory. If you feel like your company could use some guidance, please visit guerrilla76.com and consider requesting a strategy. We'd love to have a conversation that's gorillaliketheanimal76.com now let's get into the episode. The manufacturing sector is bracing for the silver Tsunami, the wave of retiring veterans taking decades of know how out the door. My guest today will tell you that's only part of the problem. In this episode, we explore the bigger piece. Most shops overlook the tribal knowledge that slips away every day. In what you don't write down, you'll hear how his shop already puts AI to work on the floor, why he's convinced AI will create manufacturing jobs rather than erase them, and what a machine shop looks like five years out. Let me introduce him. Jamie Marzilli is the founder and president of Marzilli Machine Company, a family owned precision CNC machine shop serving the medical, aerospace and defense industries. Jamie started the shop on a dare from his wife Leanne, now the company's CEO, and grew it from a 4,000 square foot garage and into an as 9,100 certified multimillion dollar 22 person operation that recently expanded into a 13,000 square foot building and is set to expand again with 31 years in the trade. Jamie is a pro shop ERP power user, host of the Raw Material podcast, part of the Making Chips Network, and founder of Warpcore AI where he's building agentic AI systems for manufacturers. Jamie, welcome to the show.

Speaker C: Thanks Joe. Pleasure to be here.

Speaker B: It's great to have you here. Well, I enjoyed our conversation the other day as we were kind of thinking about what we wanted to talk about here. And we were put in touch because you recently launched your show, as I just mentioned, Raw Material on the Making Chips Network, which our show is a part of as well. Tell us a little bit about how that came about, what made you decide to start a podcast, and, uh, how Making Chips fits into all of it.

Speaker C: Well, the Making Chips Network is an amazing community of industry leaders and peers that started off as a podcast, from my understanding, is one of the longest running podcasts in the country. And I was a fan of it. I used to listen often. I was a guest of it, uh, before it became a network. You know, we've always followed it. I contribute a lot to the Pro Shop erp, the webinars and the speaking engagements to try to help other Pro Shop users and to convince people it's a good move for your company to get rid of the paper and your business. I was at Top Shops for an engagement and they invited me to do the Boring bar podcast, their 500th episode. And I spent the entire week with them. They actually, they ended up being at Boombastic. I went down to go support Titan Gilroy down at his new facility and they happened to be there as well. And from a mixture of joking around and having a good time together, the Raw Material podcast was born.

Speaker B: That's awesome. What's the show about?

Speaker C: When you listen to a lot of podcasts like, and I know that the audience for this particular podcast, most podcasts are geared towards people like us, people who are either got their head above the weeds or they're completely above the weeds. They're in the C suite, they're white collar, and a lack of understanding of what the rest of us are going through as we're going through that journey. I'm on the tail end of this journey, but I'm still there. And it was a brutal journey at times. And so I wanted to start sharing some of my experiences and the ways that I figured out how to get out of trouble spots with other people. So, you know, my grandmother had always taught me that, you know, we pay things forward. And before I started my own company, I actually wanted to teach machine shop at my alma mater, and I came very close to doing that. And we actually started this company about three months after I lost that job to the gentleman who got it. I think I'm still a teacher at heart. We say all the time here at Marzilli Machine that we run a school for profit. The podcast was a way for me to do it a little bit more efficiently, share with people some of the things that I get to see, because a lot of us don't get a chance to get out of our bubble with your nose to the grind every single day. Networking is a, uh, is not something you really have the time for. So we get kind of stuck with our own angle, looking out of our own little bubble, trying to figure out how to fix things. And one of the most important things that I did was I got out of that bubble. The introduction of Pro Shop was kind of a big part of that. Once I got out of that bubble, I could kind of see the view a little bit easier, and it was easier to make some of the decisions I needed to do to grow my company. I wanted to talk to that audience. I wanted that audience to have a voice in the podcasting, that somebody who sounds like them, who talks like them, who understands how what's going on, who hasn't made it to the point where they're worried about EBITDA and tax savings yet, you know, everybody's like, oh, tax savings? There are no tax savings if you don't make profits. So, you know, those people need help, and they need a voice in the industry as well. And the truth is, is they outnumber you guys, like, 100 to 1, and they feel like you guys are talking at them and not talking to them. And so that's actually where the name Raw Material came from. And our tagline is pushing people, not buttons. Because my goal with this is one I'm just going to be myself. I don't want to put a show on for anybody. If you don't like my podcast, there's a hundred others. Go pick a different one. I want to be myself. I want to share our life experiences with people. I want to allow them to learn from our experiences. I swear a lot. I've got a Boston accent, and I figured that raw presence on the podcast might be something people would enjoy. And we were at, uh, Roush Yates doing the Born Bot podcast. And it just came to me and people loved it, and that's how the raw material podcast was born.

Speaker B: Well, love it. I love how authentic it is. You're off to a great start, so keep it going. Keep the momentum going. Awesome.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker B: Well, Jim, you've had a pretty unconventional career path from my understanding. Tool maker, machinist, car salesman, service manager, shop owner, owner, consultant, podcaster, now AI entrepreneur. Done a lot of stuff like, tell us a little bit about your journey, some of the lessons along the way that have kind of shaped how you're thinking about business today.

Speaker C: Before I go through each one of those.

Speaker B: Yeah. Pick and choose what makes sense to talk about.

Speaker C: Right. What I'd like to share is, especially for my audience and the people who might be listening, is I remember very clearly being in each one of those moments, especially, like, when I got stuck in the car business and I. I thought to myself, this is the lowest point in life I could be in so far from my dreams. And now as I'm grabbing my dreams and crushing them and finding the challenges and dreaming up new things, when I look back at all of those experiences, I see how every one of them shaped me to get to where I am today. I went to trade school for this. I started when I was 15 years old. You know, I know kind of young to have 31 years of machine shop experience, but I started when I was a kid. The school I went to in Fall River, Massachusetts, is a very unique school. Always places well in SkillsUSA. They do a unique system where they do two weeks on and two weeks off. So the students get two weeks to really get in depth into the projects before they switch and go to academics. My senior year in high school, I did my co op. I was the only student selected that year, in 1998, to do my apprenticeship program at the Gillette Company in Boston, which was right around when they were doing the Razor Wars. And Mach 3 was supposed to be like the end all of razors. And so that was a big thing while I was working there. Uh, that was too far for me to drive. When you're a kid, you're typically stupid. And instead of just moving closer to work, I decided to just go get a different job. And I, uh, became a tool and die maker working on progressive dies for a couple of years. So I did a tool and die makers apprenticeship for a few years. All my friends were making a lot more money in CNCs. This is in the late 90s. This is right about when you know, Haas became prevalent and most medium small manufacturing companies, now mom and pop companies, could now afford to put a CNC on their floor. So it really started taking off. And anybody who could use a CNC was very valuable. And I was awful at it. The jump between the tactile sensation of cutting it with my hands and with my mind and the pressing of the buttons and the understanding of the canned cycles. I had a lot of trouble. I jumped jobs a couple times, found a place with prototrack machines, and all of a sudden it just started making sense. The whole thing just started making sense. And that boss brought on mastercam. I was the youngest guy in the shop. I was the only one with a computer in his home. And so he was like, go figure it out. To the kids who are doing this today who have, you know, programs like Titan Gilroy's system with titans of CNC Academy, which we have been a founding member of. We're small group number three here at Marzilli Machine. You go online on your phone and there's a guy literally explaining step by step how to do CNC machining. I had to use a book and call a guy on the phone to explain it to me like in like Windows 98.

Speaker B: Isn't that wild?

Speaker C: Uh, it was a totally different experience back then. Life was a little slower. That much I can remember. The expectations of going fast all the time was. I don't remember feeling that kind of pressure like how it is now. I stayed at that one shop until 911 happened and then everybody lost their job. I had to make money. You know, I had a daughter I was taking care of. And so I started selling cars, whatever I needed to do to make money. And I was very good at it. I sold a lot of cars. The hours were bad for me. They moved me into the service department so that way I wouldn't quit. Service is also a sales position as well. You sell service. In the service department, I learned how to run a crew. I learned about ERP systems. I learned about working with customers. I moved out of that dealership. I went to go work at Hyundai's. I learned about dealing with rich people. That experience comes in handy because I find that buyers, even though they are not rich people, mostly the ability to spend a couple of million dollars makes them feel that way. So they expect to be treated in a certain fashion and, you know, you gotta play the game. I learned a lot about people and contracts and business when I was in the car business. But I really, I just longed for to get back to the trade I really missed working with my hands. Just took any job I could get. And the second time I needed to switch jobs to go do something, the guy that originally laid me off at 911 hired me back. And I spent the next all of my 20s working there, running his company for him. I needed to leave that job for personal reasons, and I went and found another job closer to my house. I hated working for that guy. The guy I went to go work for, he was not a machinist. He did not understand what was going on. My wife dared me to start my own. And, you know, when I was that old, yeah, I was susceptible to daring me. So I googled it. I just googled how to start a machine shop and wrote a business plan and got help from the SBA and raised money and I did it. I just worked by myself for almost the first two years. I just bought a couple of machines and I just worked in this. I rented half of a garage for like 500 bucks a month that was already set up with the power and everything I needed. And it was a wild time, man. You know, it was just me in this garage that had like, old metal haloid lights. It looked like a dungeon. I had a couple of manual lathes and a Haas VF3 and a Prototrack lathe, uh, a Bridgeport and a DPM. And I was just. I did everything. I answered the mail, I cut the checks, I sent out the bills, I. I delivered the parts, I went and picked up the material because we weren't buying enough material to be worthy of delivery. So it's just everything. I did, every single aspect of it. And I made money my first year. Not a lot, but I made money. By the time my second year was done, it was time for me to hire some people. So when I got to about two or three people, my wife Leanne joined the team. My wife has a master's in business. She had just graduated from college. Her father owned a machine shop. And also then that machine shop got converted to a business that bought and sold machine tools. And her mother was a. We call it fractional cfo. That's what we say now. But she would go jump around from company to company and fix their books for them. So she'd have like two or three clients and she would go and do their books for them. And so Lee came from this world, and she understood how the book should work. And we had. Her parents helped us out a lot with how to run a business and what we were doing wrong and directional and growth and things like that. You, uh, know, we grew probably 30, 40% year after year until the tariffs hit us the first time. And that was pretty bad. We didn't understand the consequences of being too deep inside of other machine shops and not having diversity in your customer base. It's so interesting how the devil is in the details with a lot of this stuff, because we're looking at the kinds of parts coming in, and they're obviously aerospace parts, medical parts, commercial parts. And we're thinking, oh, look at the diversification we have and the kind of work we have. But our customer concentration, which is what we really should have been looking at, was too heavy in machine shops. Now that we're a, uh, bigger company and I have my own vendors, I understand why you carry vendors. You need people you can trust, and what you really need is an accordion. So when things are too busy, you have people you can trust, and you can outsource 20% of what you have on your backlog. And when things tighten up, you can pull that back in. So when the tariffs hit and hit pretty hard, a lot of my customers went out of business and pulled a lot of their work in and kind of left us hanging. So we had to kind of figure things out, got the business back on its feet, and then in 2020, we got kick squarely in the cajones with COVID That was fun. So it's been a really interesting time in American history to try to start and maintain a manufacturing company. The tariffs this time around, you know, were pretty bad, but, you know, we only touched the stove once. You know, we don't work for any machine shops now. We're strictly oem, um, defense and aerospace now. And that kind of hedged us quite a bit against the impacts of the tariffs. But. And that's kind of how I got to here. And in 2020, we made a decision, my wife and I, that the machine shop itself just ran too close to the line to consider it to be successful. There wasn't enough meat left over at the end of every year that we could survive a catastrophic incident. And so we needed to do something different. And we got this very small window of time where the entire country was shut down, but we had been designated a critical supplier, so everyone had to keep coming to work. But it wasn't like there was a lot to do and the government was paying people to show up. I read an article in Modern Machine Shop magazine about pro shop, and I said, this is something different. Like, I could see we started doing, like, experiments, like how Much time do we spend a week looking for paper travelers, things like that? The time was staggering. Like when you actually stopped and looked at it, I think it was when you added everybody together. It was like one day a week that we spent looking for paperwork and trying to find things that we needed or waiting for things to show up. Then we started calculating how much time and expedite fees we were spending because the planning wasn't done properly or we. We needed to do something and it wasn't ready to go. So you'd have to. Now you have to expedite the shipping, expedite the hardware to come in. It ended up being a lot of money, way more than you would think it is. It's a game of death by a thousand paper cuts. And so we made the jump and we jumped onto Pro Shop and we never looked back. Within two years of us implementing that, we had doubled in size. And I made the most money that year than I made more net profit that year than the following nine years combined. The previous nine years combined. And I said, this is it. This is what we're doing wrong. And from there, it changed my mentality. And the mentality that it changed in me was that I don't know as much as I think I know and that I should just start approaching everything like that. It doesn't matter that I'm an expert at this or at that. I probably don't know as much as I need to know. And so I became a learn it all instead of a know it all. And that journey led me to go into other software suites and to start solving. Pro Shop was like a solution to the whole company, right? It manages a lot of things between almost everything between the quote to cash. But then there are worlds inside of there that also needed to be managed better, like scheduling and quality control and machine monitoring and things like that. So we started diving into that kind of stuff, and before you knew it, we were one of the Most advanced Industry 4.0 companies you had ever seen. Not a shred of paper in the entire company. And for a company my size, that was unheard of. It's getting more popular now.

Speaker B: Well, Jamie, congrats on what you built. I mean, uh, really cool to hear your story. I love founder stories, and especially the ones that start in a garage. It seems to be like this thing, right? And all of a sudden, before you know it, you're just down the road, you're running this really successful company, and that takes a lot of grit to get there. So congrats on what you've done.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker B: I'm sure Paul Van Meter, uh, at Pro Shop Europe, will appreciate the unprompted ad for what he's doing. He's doing great work. I've had him on the show a few times. He's also part of that Making Chips network of, uh, podcasts. But one theme that I remember talking about, Paul, about the first time I had him on the show, which was probably like four or five years ago at this point, was this idea of, like, working on the business, not in the business, like building tribal, like harnessing tribal knowledge. And you and I were talking about this a few days ago and preparation of this conversation that this. And we all hear about the Gray tsunami and, like, the mass exodus of boomers from the manufacturing workforce and all the knowledge they're taking out the door. You mentioned to me that you kind of. You saw this come in, like you were thinking about this before it became a big thing that's in the, you know, all over the news. Talk about that a little bit and, like, why do you think this industry still underestimates what a big problem this is becoming?

Speaker C: Oh, okay. That's a lot. That's a lot to unpack.

Speaker B: But take it wherever you'd like it.

Speaker C: Let's give it a roll. All right, so we call it the Silver Tsunami. We give those gentlemen a lot of respect.

Speaker B: I like it.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's number one. Number two, before I understood how important any of this was, I did notice when I was younger, when I was in my late teens and in my early 20s, that when I was walking into different jobs that I would go and take, there was nobody like 10 to 15 years older than me. There were no 35 year olds. There were no 40 year olds. Everybody was 40 and older and 55 and getting up there already. That was happening already as I got older and I started to see this trend in many places. What I remember was, I remember when I was a kid, you know, and they had all those commercials with, like, people cooking eggs on tv and they're like, this is your brain on drugs.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Our parents and grandparents were telling us, if you don't go to college and get a job in insurance or Wall street or banking, if you do not go after white collar work, you're going to be a jobless bum. That's what they were telling us. And that working with your hands was a fool's errand. Everybody abandoned the trades and they went to college to get into Wall street and to mortgage brokering and all these Other different types of things on the other side of that. The flip side of that, our trade has not traditionally paid well. Even it's most the closest neighbor, which I would say is probably construction work. You can stand on the side of the street and make 30 bucks an hour. Where you need to come inside this building and be an engineer to figure out some of the world's most difficult problems. And you were making like 22 to $25 an hour. We were doing it to ourselves. I think that this has a lot to do with geopolitics. You know, not that I'm an expert on any of that, but I'll break it down for simple people to understand. It's you're not quoting your plumber out around the world. You're picking your electrician based on who's willing to climb under your house, how local they are, and the two or three people you quoted it that are nearby. You're not sending that out as an RFQ to India to see whether or not you can underbid Joe from down the street. Where in the machine tool world, because it's a commodity that fits onto shipping containers and you can send it across anywhere in the world. We are one of the only trades that has to compete globally. So we have to hire locally and pay competitive wages locally, but we have to price our stuff out in a global market. I think that was a real failure by our politicians and our leaders in the 80s and the 90s when they allowed some of these larger corporations and politicians to do these cash grabs and these free trade deals and they kind of left the rest of us holding the bag. And to the other point about the escape of the tribal knowledge itself, I'm, um, of two minds of this one. The older folks are taking really, really critical knowledge away from them. I'm not sure how critical it is to today's world. I don't think that the folks who are 70 years old or 65 years old who are retiring today are crippling the industry. I actually think we are crippling the industry. There is this misunderstanding of the term tribal knowledge. If you break the word down into just its two words, it's tribal, which implies the tribe, which is everyone, and then knowledge. Right? But when you heard that, what you hear is elder. You hear elder tribal knowledge, Right. And so we're all freaking out that the elders are moving on. And so we're so focused that we don't realize that tribal knowledge is happening every day. It's happening in every conversation, it's happening in Every problem you solve today, I'm not going to my 65 year old mentor to ask him how to set up my 5 axis mill. He has no idea. He thinks I'm doing voodoo. And some of the things that you needed to know back then don't apply anymore. When I came up as a machinist, you needed to be able to mill, turn and grind in order to be able to say you were a machinist. That doesn't matter anymore. In fact, in the real world while it's happening, the chances that you will pick up more than one specialty in today's world are slim. Right now what we need is specialists. We need to be able to pay people competitive wages. And in order to do that, I need you to be as good as you possibly can at this. Just one particular thing. Now, whether that's 5 axis milling or advanced turning or even manual machining, I don't need my manual machinist to be the best CNC guy I've ever had. He's got a specialty, I'm willing to pay him top dollar for that. Cross training is excellent and it should happen all the time, but it shouldn't be the mainest. The main concern, we don't have that kind of time anymore. And then in regards to some of the other like soft skills that have kind of gotten lost where like we don't teach kids how to square up a block anymore or uh, we don't teach kids how to single point thread anymore. That's true. We used to think that the way when I was taught they would teach you mill, turn and grind. And if your employer needed you to run a cnc, that was his responsibility to teach you. That's how it used to be told to us. It's just flipped on its head now. You need to learn how to read an advanced blueprint. You have to be able to understand geometric tolerancing and you have to be able to set up and run a CNC machine. And that will get you a job. And then after that it is on you, the individual and your employer to provide the opportunity not to kick you up the ladder, just to provide the opportunity to learn these advanced skills. And then you're going to pick one that you like and then you move along with that. I find guys who love the lathe department, I have other guys who are petrified that this thing is spinning. They're not interested in that. And so we need people so desperately in this trade. I think we've given up on that and that we're Just like you want to be a lathe guy, I've got an opening in the lathe department. Now you're a lathe guy. No problem. Become the best lathe guy you can be. I'll pay you 35, 40 bucks an hour, whatever it need, whatever. It's different in every area, but really good, skilled, quality guys are commanding that kind of money around here without a lot of trouble. That's something I hope everybody listening to this is starting to understand. If you're worried about the tribal knowledge leaving from your elders, you should start focusing on the tribal knowledge that's escaping just through the ether. Just because, uh, you go out on the floor and you teach Joe how to fix something and nobody writes it down.

Speaker B: Okay, we're going to take a quick break from the conversation here. Picture a world one year from now where the thousands or tens of thousands of design engineers, plant managers, project managers, operations folks, CEOs, or whoever you need to reach and influence, already knew who your company was, understood your value proposition, considered you the expert in your product category, and believed you could help them solve their problems. In this world, your prospects would come to you with their guards down, already informed and genuinely excited to talk about how you could help them. And your sales team could reallocate the time they spend slinging product into facilitating deeper, more engaged conversations with right fit prospects who actually have buying intent. So how do you get from here to there? Well, I can assure you of this, it doesn't start by dabbling in SEO or making your website look prettier or posting more social media updates. It starts with a strategic marketing plan rooted in the most important business outcomes that your manufacturing organization needs to achieve. I'm talking about outcomes like pipeline and revenue growth targets, or, uh, new market penetration or, uh, customer diversification. Start with the outcome, then reverse engineer the marketing program that will help you achieve it. For well over a decade, our team of industrial marketers at Guerrilla 76 has been helping OEMs, machine builders, contract manufacturers, robotic systems integrators, and Industry 4.0 technology companies strategize and implement revenue focused marketing programs. If you feel like your company could use some guidance, please visit guerrilla76.com and consider requesting a strategy call. We'd love to have a conversation. That's gorillaliketheanimal76.com. Now let's get back to the episode. So, Jamie, I know you're doing some really interesting things from a technology standpoint. You and I had had a side conversation about all the ways we're using AI in Our own businesses right now. Talk about how you're solving some of the biggest problems that you're seeing out

Speaker C: there with technology right now we live in one of the most exciting times to be alive. It is a shame that our news cycles tell us that we are trying to convince us that we have everything that we need to do to live in fear for everything. But we now live in a point in time where you can do almost anything. You can imagine. We are using different AI tools inside of this company in very interesting ways. Again, I think it really just comes down to what you can do through your imagination. So I'll share with you guys some of the like little things and stuff that people can implement in their shops right away with no training with no, you just didn't think of it honestly. And then I'll get into some of the stuff I'm doing with my tech company, startup Warp Core AI. Right off the bat, if you have either Claude or ChatGPT installed on your cell phone, they're both good at certain things. If you're looking for like technical stuff, technical answers, real clean answers, Claude is the way to go. If you're looking for understanding and just having the ability to just talk to it plainly, think of it more like if you need the width of knowledge, talk to Chat. If you need the depth of knowledge, talk to Claude. Okay, so I'll come into work and there's an alarm on one of the machines and I bring the code up on the screen and then I go in through my Chat GPT app and I take a picture of the screen and I tell it what kind of machine machine and what kind of controller I have. And I ask it to debug this for me. And then it tells me me and chat start fixing that machine before I call any type of person to come to do applications work for me. Because time is money, right? That's what we do in machine shops. Don't anybody get it twisted. No matter what you do, you turn time into money. We use plastic and metal as the medium to do so. So the faster. Nobody cares how you get. This isn't college. Nobody cares how you're getting the answers. You don't have to show your work, just get the answer and get the machine back up and running. You know, we have a lot of Matt Cerber machines in here. Wonderful brand, excellent machines. We have some that are a little bit older and we had an issue with one of the glass scales letting go on one of the B axis is on a horizontal. We don't Use that. We never do true fourth axis machining in that machine. We always just index with it. I don't need a glass scale on that machine. So we shut it off and we used Claude to help us fix the parameters in the back of the machine to adjust them so we could disable the scale and then reset the gear ratio so that way it would work normally. What else are we using it for? I mean, we're using it the same way everybody else is using it. Like I have it. Translate my angry emails for me. Everybody does that, right? You write an email and you're like, I've had enough of your shit.

Speaker B: Ba rah rah, rah. Yes.

Speaker C: And then you copy it into chat. Chat says it translates it into corporate for you.

Speaker B: It's great. You get. You still get your chance to rant. Right? But then some.

Speaker C: Exactly. So, yeah, you still feel the anger. You know, you're hoping the guy on the other end of that is going, oh man, this used to be a really angry email. Uh, that kind of stuff. Let me see, what else are we doing? We're using it like that a lot. I have a new year. I have a trainee here. It's important. I guess what I should tell you guys is we. I have my own $20 a month business subscription to ChatGPT and we were.

Speaker B: You.

Speaker C: I'm using it so much to just flush out ideas and to. I used it a lot while I was trying to figure out what should warp core be. What I like about ChatGPT is that it has a memory that is constantly running. Claude's a little bit different than that. You have to prompt it for a memory constantly. You have to build your own markdown files and because it always knows what I'm talking about when I want to talk to it about my warp core company, if I want to flush out idea about raw material, I don't have to constantly remind it who I am and what I do. It just remembers. Right. I don't have to explain to it that I'm showing it pictures of machine tools. It knows that's what I'm doing here. That's what I like that one for. What we did was we made another shop account and we gave. We installed it on all of the computers out on the shop floor and gave it all, everybody the same email address and same password. And they are using it out on the floor to stop looking through books. Basically, I want to give a shout out to my friend Jeremiah Moore, who invented Don the Master M Machinist, which is an Agent that he built and went live on Chad GPT. So if you search through the existing agents, you can find Don, the master machinist. And you can ask Don things like what's the tap drill for a quarter 20 tap or what's the, what surface footage would you run this three flute end mill in this aluminum an inch and a half deep and it know it'll answer you.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker C: Yeah. So we've taken that idea and I'm friends with Jeremy, so I've asked him if we can kind of build that into the platform that we're using and he's working with us on this. You know, I'll go into what we're doing with Warp Core. We are taking my brain and we are cloning it into a LLM and then we are building a small army of on the edge AI agents that will become departments inside of my company and they will begin doing the menial tasks that we don't want to do anymore. Things that don't make sense to do in 2026. Why are we manually reading certs in this day and age? Right. I mean it's prone to error. I taught myself how to code in Claude code. I used one AI to teach me how to use the other. And I built a device that an agent that scans my codes, my certs and stuff to make sure that they match where they're supposed to go. So we don't put any CUI data in it, but we have it checked to make sure that is this the right material, is the purchase order on this match? And what used to take somebody like 15, 20 minutes to go through and read all the documents, it does in about 30 seconds. That's wild. This is the future. The question that everyone is asking is if you can begin to automate all of these tasks, doesn't this mean everybody's going to get put out of work? And the answer is no. And I can back this up with some facts and stuff. But what I'm going to tell you is that if you work in machining, the reason that the company is the size that it is right now is because it's directly proportional to the amount of revenue it can generate, not to the amount of people that they require to work there. Because if they had enough money to hire another 20 people and that they weren't going to lose money on that, they would keep hiring and keep growing. Right, because they can buy machines and they can find customers. We're drowning in work out here. You know, we need like 3 million people to fill the number of manufacturing jobs that are open right now, what's going to happen is we are going to begin to superpower certain individuals inside of companies, mostly middle managers. Now that's what Industry 4.0 went after the first time. When it came around. If you were a uh, 15, 20 million dollar company, you probably had five or six middle managers handling things like scheduling and customer outreach and machine monitoring and schedule creep and all these other different things, right? And now you digitize all of this stuff and now all of a sudden all it does, uh, it takes two people to do what six people were doing. I think what's going to happen now, I don't think that those two people are going to go down to one person. I think that what those two people are going to do on a daily basis is going to change. And instead of going from being very involved in all the microscopic churnings of what happens on the day to day, they will begin doing things like monitoring dashboards, making executive decisions, feeding the AI direction, being a part of like a version of machine learning. So this way they can continue to build up the systems. There are other examples of this where automation has come into the industry and the unemployment level doesn't rise dramatically the way they expected it to because they take those people and they put them into other positions that are even more useful to the company now. And so instead of having a bunch of people who are dissatisfied with their job, who can't make a good living, who are button pushing or part loading, now those people are being very useful and making better wages and being more of a part of the purpose of your company. And you're going to have robotics, which we already have, and AI agents, which is the mental decision making ability for these robotics. And they're going to be taking care of a lot of these menial tasks that we don't want to do anymore. I'm an optimist on this. I actually think this is going to create jobs by creating revenue streams for small to medium businesses that they are then going to begin to hire. Every single person listening to this has one or two jobs they wish they could fill, but they cannot explain to the boss how they're going to get an ROI on this. Right. And if the company was just flush with cash, nobody cares anymore. Now we can take a risk where right now it's all, it's always got to be about risk management. The lines in manufacturing are too thin for you to go out on a limb on anything.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a really interesting perspective. Well, Jamie, as You look, say, five years down the road or so. What does a machine shop like yours look like? One that's staying ahead of the curve and is evolving the way that you see a machine shop evolving?

Speaker C: I think that's a good question. I would pin myself as an optimist on this as well. I think that as we're seeing the decline in the number of software engineers that the industry needs, and I actually think we're going to see a little bit of a decline in the number of auto mechanics the industry needs, as the push for electrification of cars and the simplification of cars requires less and less people. These are folks who are primed already to join this industry for retraining, who will do well. They're already geared in this manner because this is a wonderful industry of, between rocket science and mechanical and all of that kind of stuff where you're working with your hands and you're working with technology and you're able to pull ideas right from the ether and be an artist. And you have a lot of purpose when you work at one of these companies, when they're run well, you feel like you're a part of something and you're building something. And I think that's what people really want in life is they want to feel a sense of purpose. And so when I. What do I see happening in the next five years is I see a renaissance of young people coming back to manufacturing as they start to lose their faith in advanced learning institutions. As the narratives now are not, if you don't go to college, you're going to be homeless now. It's maybe you shouldn't go to college. That's a debt you may never escape from. And we might see people starting to be a lot more interested in working with their hands again and working with their hearts and becoming artists. And as they start to get reintroduced to this trade, this is a completely new industry. Industry. You know, we still fight the 3Ds, right? It's dirty, it's dingy, uh, dark. Dangerous. Right, It's. And that's because, like your grandfather remembers a machine shop having belts hanging from the ceiling, running a South Bend lathe. But this is one of. Especially in the CNC side of things. And again, not all machine shops are built the same. But in the advanced aerospace industry, which is really where we need to attract people to, this is a fairly safe job. Machines are all enclosed, and I think that's attractive. As a parent, as a parent who has children, I'm like, this is a lot safer now for my kids than it was for me when I learned it. I think we're going to see a lot of people kind of gravitating back towards the trade. The wages have come up significantly in the last few years, so now it's a lot more competitive with a lot of these where construction wages, they've climbed slightly, but for the most part they're flat and manufacturing wages have caught up to them. And so now it's a good choice. Do I want to work outside and stand in the sun or do I want to work at this amazingly clean place with a break room where I'm learning new things and I'm making parts for spaceships? I think that's an easy decision for young people and I think that the industry as a whole, it will get easier and easier for machine shop owners to be successful. As the systems for running machine shops are bleeding their way deeper. Pro shop becomes bigger and job boss and these other ERPs, these quality control systems, 10, 15 years ago, a lot of people didn't even understand, they didn't even know. You need to have documentation and you can't compete if you're not as 9100. But now this is well known that if you want to build a shop, you have to have these things if you want to build a reasonable shop. So I think you're going to see a lot more. I mean, we do need to do some work on the finance side of manufacturing. We are not a traditionally easy business to start up from a financial perspective. Very cash heavy up front and very complicated to get from quote to cash. But those are things that the SBA does a pretty decent job. They understand the difficulties of it. So I'm, um, optimistic. I think AI is going to make these businesses more attractive to young people. It's going to make them easier for operators and owners to do their jobs and to do it well. I think it's going to unleash productivity and efficiency that's going to cause companies that were struggling or hanging on the line. If they can adapt to these things quickly enough, I think that they will see the same kind of growth that our fathers saw as they moved from manual to CNC machining. And I think that these new tools are going to solve both the garbage in, garbage out problems that plague a lot of us, and also the tribal knowledge escape factor. Especially if you think about it the way that I'm telling you, don't think about it as just old people leaving the industry, think about it as the loss of your production manager Think about it, uh, like, and he's a young man, right? But he lives in between your erp, your CRM and your qms. He's the guy that holds everything together when the systems fall apart. And if that guy leaves, that guy takes a tremendous amount of tribal knowledge away with him. And so protecting yourself is gathering that information. And AI gives you the ability now to gather this information and to parse it in a way that is useful to human beings and to utilize it in the shop floor. And now all you gotta do is figure out is how do you get this back to the shop floor to complete this cycle, to start teaching the next guy who needs to learn these things. So I'm an optimist. I think we're going to see a good horizon for this trade moving into a better direction.

Speaker B: Well, love your outlook, Jamie, and really appreciated the conversation today. This was really great. For anybody who is interested in checking out your podcast, I encourage you to do. We'll please go take a look at Raw Material. It's part of the Making Chips network. You can find it on Apple, Spotify, Imagine, all kinds of other places too. Jamie, if people want to get in touch with you or learn more about Marzilli Machine, where would you send them?

Speaker C: The best way to get a hold of me is probably on my LinkedIn page. Just look up James Marzilli. Or you can reach out to us directly on our Website, which is marsmachine.com Mars is spelled with a Z like my last name. We're really interested in hearing from the community. If you're following along with us with Raw Material, you're going to get to hear a lot of the exploits that me and my wife went through as we were first starting and a lot of the relationships we've made over the way. A lot of people are interested in coming and interviewing and telling you what they've learned as well. So it's going to be really knowledgeable and I, uh, think it'll be interesting for everybody regardless of where you are. From the C suite all the way down to the bottom.

Speaker B: Ah, awesome. Well, Jamie, thanks for doing this today.

Speaker C: Thank you so much, Joe. Appreciate it.

Speaker B: As for the rest of you, I hope to catch you on the next episode of the Manufacturing Executive.

Speaker A: You've been listening to the Manufacturing Executive podcast to ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player. If you'd like to learn more about industrial marketing and sales strategy, you'll find an ever expanding collection of articles, videos, guides and tools. Specifically for B2B manufacturers at gorilla76.com learn thank you so much for listening. Until next time.