The Virtual Operator with Phillip Hansel

Phillip Hansel, CEO and Co-founder of AIOps, joins Erik Reynolds to talk about what happens when reinforcement learning shows up on the factory floor. Phillip spent more than a decade as a control systems engineer in oil, gas, and chemical processing, and now builds AI for the same kind of plants he once worked in. They cover the virtual operator, an AI agent trained to run a process the way a seasoned human would. They get into why shaping that agent's behavior makes the modern controls engineer as much psychologist as engineer. The conversation also gets into the plants where these agents already run, a 20-year control problem one of them quietly solved, and why Phillip is adamant this technology exists to back up human operators rather than replace them. More on ⁠AIOps: https://ai-ops.com/ More on Reynolds & Moore: https://reynolds-moore.com/