AI will not replace the field application engineer

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Unless you´ve been hiding under a rock you have heard about OPenAI´s ChatGPT which will revolutionalize most of the service sectors and professions. But AI cannot replace the fiels application engineers, says Graham Maggs, the marketing chief for Mouser EMEA.

- We are fully aware of ChatGPT, of course. We´re certainly keeping a close eye on it. We are not utilizing that AI process except in small marketing applications. And even at that we´ll have a human edit involved. We are not creating content using AI and we have no plans to.

Maggs maintains that there are restrictions on what you can use AI for.We´re not into simplistic ways to create content. We want our customers to be sure in the quality of the content and the material we are using. The content has to be significantly better that with using AI.

- Whether AI in ten years´ time is going to be significantly different from what it is today, who knows. AI by nature is a selflearning process. As it learns, it should be improving. At this time it is not our plan to utilize AI.

Engineers today are a great deal more trained in the multi facets of their business, Maggs emphasizes. - They are production engineers, design engineers, component engineers manufacturing engineers, quality engineers all wrapped up into one person.

This doesn´t mean that Mouser is not investing in automation. If the company spend 80-90 Million dollars in a new building, they invest 120-150 Million into automation within that building.

But that will not remove the individual from the warehouse.- We´ve actually doubled the number of people working for Mouser during the last five or six years. So we´re adding people throughout the company, but we´re trying to make the system and the process much more efficient.

- Automation only goes so far. It’s the human with those robots, that makes the difference. You can put as much automation into the system as you want, but if you don’t have the correct human interface, then it falls down.

Self-inflicted problems?

At the end of 2022 the EMS companies had component stocks worth of 17.5 Billion euros. Is the whole question of availability a self-inflicted problem?

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- I´ve been in this industry since 1978. I´ve been on the road as a sales person since 1982. There has always been peaks and drops in this business. This is no different.

- Yes, the supply chain is full with the exception of specific components which have had a huge backlog in capacity caused by specific demand and specific shortages of materials.

Demand is good in all industries around the world, Maggs reminds us. --->

The markets are very healthy. Still the numbers are correct.- The EMS companies, distributors and manufacturers did something which I call double dipping. Actually, I think there was a lot of triple dipping, especially by the EMS houses. And it´s not just to have products as soon as they´re needed, so they placed orders in someone like Mouser and someone like Digi-Key and someone like Arrow, and whoever was able to supply those products quickest they would take those products and cancel elsewhere.

That´s why a lot of distributors started to take in orders with no change of canceling. At the same time they did take in orders and had to accept cancellations. We´re no different. We´ve had lots of cancellations, but it is different from an Arrow or an Avnet. Getting a cancellation on a thousand dollar order is a lot different from getting a cancellation of a Million dollar order.

- I know that there is a lot of inventory out there. I know that there are still shortages. I´m confident that the demand is still there. I think we´ll see a recovery of bookings at the end of the year.

For Mouser inventory is king. If people need something, especially in small quantities, they come to us. And we´re still up from last year, by they way. We were forecasting a very small, couple of digits growth this year and we were even worried that we´d be below last year but that’s not been the case. Only recently we´ve gone below double digit growth this year, so it´s been a very good start for the year.