DIGITAL meets INDUSTRIAL

I was at a event last nite, surrounded by serious technology leaders. Someone mentioned a peer company that turned on Copilot but “didn’t even configure it” – said with the kind of horror usually reserved for production outages.

It sparked a heated debate. I found myself firmly on the side of leaving things largely unlocked, because almost every control we add has unintended consequences that cripple our field workers from doing their jobs better.

But reflecting on that conversation, I realized we don’t talk about this enough: How much should you actually configure your tech?

Everyone’s picking sides on the wrong battle – total freedom versus total control. Both extremes will kill your project.

Zero configuration sounds great. Let the frontline innovate, let AI do its thing, no guardrails. But you’ll spend a decade cleaning up the mess, chasing standards, trying to scale what can’t be scaled. It will take you a decade to get to where you want to go.

100% lockdown is worse. You think you know how workers will use the tool. You’re wrong. I’ve watched companies spend millions on systems so locked down, so “configured for safety,” that nobody uses them. The tech just sits there, another expensive ghost in the plant.

The answer isn’t picking a side. It’s finding the balance and never stopping there.

The best deployment I ever ran had some guardrails, some general configuration but was otherwise wide open for field workers to innovate. The result? They didn’t just use the tool. They made it the most important thing in their kit. Then they turned around and taught my team uses we never imagined. Huge innovation. Adoption rates we’d never seen before. Everyone won.

That only happened because we configured enough to keep pointed in the right direction, but left enough freedom for people to make the tool theirs. Then we iterated constantly. This applies to AI engines, hardware, applications -everything.

But here’s the part that matters most: spend time with your people. Watch how they actually work. Listen to what they actually need. The right balance isn’t in a manual or a best practice guide. It’s in the field, with the workers using your tools every day.