Intertape Polymer Group (IPG), a discrete manufacturer with thousands of employees, partnered with Sight Machine to address a recurring industrial-data problem: factories generate massive volumes of data each year, but most of it remains underutilized. Insights largely reached engineers and managers, while shop floor operators and other stakeholders lacked accessible analytics. IPG and Sight Machine set out to create a data-first platform that contextualized factory data and made it accessible to everyone — from executives to production staff — enabling real-time decisions rather than after-the-fact analysis.
Sight Machine deployed its Manufacturing Data Platform on Microsoft Azure, leveraging Azure OpenAI Service and GPT-4 to build Factory CoPilot — a natural language interface that breaks down data accessibility barriers. The chat-based tool lets non-experts query plant data in conversational English without statistical expertise. Kurt DeMaagd, Cofounder and Chief AI Officer at Sight Machine, explained: “Any person can go into this chat client, type a question using normal English phrasing… and it will give them back a reply in human-readable format.” The solution auto-generates reports, summarizes trends, and surfaces stakeholder-specific insights from machine and line-level data.
Initial Factory CoPilot deployment results showed onboarding time decreased by up to 50%, weekly platform usage increased by 25%, and user adoption strengthened through the intuitive interface. IPG Plant Manager Bill Bourgeous noted the partnership “continues to become more important to our daily operations… helping us make quicker decisions on real-time data.” Sight Machine and Microsoft plan to expand Factory CoPilot capabilities across global factory networks and value chains, delivering increasingly intelligent manufacturing solutions.