Podcast profile
By Automation Ladies
The podcast where girls talk industrial automation! We interview people from all walks of life in the Industrial Automation industry.
Latest episode
37 min
Topics
Robot design, perception, control, manipulation, deployment, and robotics ecosystems.
Factory automation, controls, industrial robotics, and automated operations.
Hiring, career development, skills, workplace practice, and professional progression in technology.
Formats
Host-led conversation where a guest supplies most of the subject matter.
Detailed technical, architectural, or research-oriented examination.
Audience level
Assumes basic technology literacy and familiarity with common products, roles, and terminology.
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From the feed
Episodes shown — 10 of 25
Edge computing sounds clean on a slide deck, but the factory floor is where the definition gets real fast. We talk with Zoie Rittling, an edge computing specialist at TEGUAR, about what “compute close to the data” actually means when you’re dealing with heat, dust, vibration, uptime pressure, and constant change.
“We do it with AI” is easy to say. Making robots work through contact, uncertainty, and variation on a real factory floor is the hard part.
Paper schematics feel “reliable” until they are the reason a shutdown drags on, a cabinet print is wrong, or a tech makes a split-second mistake under pressure.
Your engineering degree taught you equations. Then your first job asks you to troubleshoot a VFD, commission a skid, and explain the problem to five different people without melting down. That jump is real, and it’s exactly what we dig into with Alice Ristoff and Cassie Gardner from eTech Group.
Most people in industrial automation agree we have a skills gap, but we keep aiming the message at ourselves.
AI isn’t just a software story, it’s a power story, a controls story, and a “how do we actually build this stuff” story. After the EPC show in Houston, I sit down with Dennis Ganson from Schneider Electric to unpack what’s changing in industrial automation and energy, and how you can stay useful as the pace picks up.
ROI math can be brutally simple, and that’s exactly why it often fails in industrial automation. If your spreadsheet only asks “how many heads are we replacing,” you might get a clean payback number, but you also risk approving the wrong projects and rejecting the right ones.
“Manufacturing is still the place where you can start out sweeping the floor and end up running the company” is a bold claim, so we brought on someone who has lived the full arc.
Most automation projects stall long before the first robot moves. Not because the technology isn’t ready, but because buying feels like a maze: vague budgets, endless “it depends” quotes, and months of back-and-forth just to learn what something costs.
Most workforce development advice sounds good until you try to scale it.