Plastics operations are typically 24/5 or 24/7. You’ve got night shift issues, weekend challenges, and a surprising amount of technical complexity—wall thickness problems, forming issues, cutting issues, tooling, water & air calculations, etc. When combined with aging workforces and labor gaps, and the need to capture and share expertise becomes critical.

At the intersection of this challenge is CognitionWorks, a company transforming how industrial firms – particularly in the plastics sector – leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to preserve expertise, optimize operations, and make sense of their data.  Thermoforming, in particular, is ripe for AI adoption. This is how thermoform.ai was born.

This platform finally makes the case for digital transformation compelling in the manufacturing sector, including thermoforming, whether for industrial or packaging applications.  It’s domain-specific and much more granular and practical than what can be found on typical frontier AI models like ChatGPT.

AI doesn’t have to be disruptive to be transformative. We’re not replacing people. We’re capturing what they know and making it accessible to others. This is how you scale excellence across shifts, plants – and generations.