Judy Warner (00:01.604) Hi, Sean. Thanks so much for joining us today. I'm really glad to have you back on the podcast and talk about the fun subjects we're going to dig into today. Sean Patterson (00:10.945) It's to be back. Judy Warner (00:13.644) Okay, so tell us a little bit about yourself, Sean, and then tell us a little bit about Summit Interconnect. Sean Patterson (00:21.624) Sure. Yeah, so again, my name is Sean Patterson. I am the Chief Technology Officer for Summit Interconnect. Summit Interconnect, we are the largest private manufacturer of bare boards in the United States, and we also have manufacturing facilities in Canada as well. We handle everything from prototyping to volume, United States level volumes through our eight manufacturing plants, including one of those is a quick turn assembly plant. And so we service aerospace and defense customers, commercial customers across the United States. Judy Warner (01:03.3) Well, I've been stalking you a little bit on LinkedIn lately and I noticed you had a title change and also sort of a little passion project that I think is tangential to your work at Summit. So can you tell us about what is behind that title change and then sort of the side project you've been working on, which I've been enjoying by the way. Sean Patterson (01:30.03) I'm glad. And I've enjoyed you participating in those areas. Yeah, so I was the chief operating officer until earlier this year. And we created a new C-suite title for chief technology officer. We didn't have that before. We realized that the COO position has a lot of day-to-day responsibilities. And with where the world is at, particularly as it relates to things like projects around AI, but also where the PCB industry has been at for the past 20, 30 years at this point in time, I'd say largely so we'll go with the dot-com bust. Our engineering in the United States is it relates to process engineering. It really kind of leveled off into maintainer mode. You already kind of battened down the hatches after the dot-com bust. And, you know, it's not that we don't have good engineers, but we haven't collectively done it as an industry to kind of get back to what good looks like and be the leaders in manufacturing. And largely a lot of that went overseas and the pricing got commoditized and the ability of companies to invest in these areas, particularly capital and people and give you really good career paths really, really didn't have a good time for. Judy Warner (02:34.158) Mm-hmm. Sean Patterson (02:43.362) couple of decades. think in the last five years, that's really changed. There's a lot of momentum towards, we'll say reshoring, but really reinventing inside the US to be to do what we need to do support particularly our space and defense and tangential to that the commercial aspects, especially when it relates to quick turn like summit does. And so Judy Warner (02:59.876) Right. Sean Patterson (03:07.554) With the CTO position taking a lot of that day, I sort of had the CTO title before I had a software development team and things like that. But at the end of the day, we have to ship products in order to even for those software development teams. And so my attention really had to be over there. Through a series of really awesome hires, quite frankly, and where our VP ranks are and our general manager ranks are right now, it really enables me to kind of step back, give the day to day to somebody else and really focus on establishing our process engineering in what you would expect from a manufacturing company in 2025, with PFMA analysis, what our own career path even looks like to keep engineers moving along, and how we start to use digital tools, industry 4.0 kind of concepts, which have struggled, honestly, globally, even in PCBs, because it's a unique beast in manufacturing. multidisciplinary engineering of contract manufacturing. And I sort of ironically put it, yeah, there's chemistry, there's chemistries, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering. Like that's really why I like it. But it is a knowable thing if you can understand and you can know it, but it does take a lot of different engineering disciplines, you know, into account. But I think like the classic example is how do most Judy Warner (04:13.976) chemistry and all of that. Sean Patterson (04:34.082) companies sort of track things, right? lot of go to RFIDs and QR codes, things like that. And it's not that we're anti using those things and we try to employ them. But when you start to put on your product, we actually make the products that make the thing that other people track with, right? RFIDs are printed mini printed circuit boards. And it happens to be that whenever you're actually manufacturing a printed circuit board, generally speaking in many parts of the manufacturing process, it's a short circuit. Judy Warner (04:49.764) All Sean Patterson (04:58.668) And so it's actually can't even function there and you're putting it into plating chemistries and heating it up to hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit under heat and pressure. And these traditional things that people would use to start to migrate towards industry 4.0, like the very industry that can even enable that is actually, it's very hard to do. We also, you know, globally are more... You know, have things like IPC and things like that, and they're great organizations. But our ability to come together as an absolute industry and drive standards for industry 4.0 has failed. It's failed for a long time. Judy Warner (05:41.156) Thank you for saying that out loud. Everybody thinks it, but I feel like in our circles, no one says it. And what I really want to know is anybody thinking about how this impacts engineers, that our audience or the companies that they run is, I mean, I know they participate in things like IPC, but anyways, it's broken. All kudos to them, but it's broken. Sean Patterson (05:47.065) It's not for lack of better, I mean, goodbye. Sean Patterson (06:01.742) It is. But look, it's also because we've become monetized globally too. And arguably, especially in the United States now, I the circuit boards that we're making in aerospace and defense are engineered products, but they're not treated that way as it relates to supply chains. And so it's been difficult. But you look at sort of like the semiconductor industry, well, you have multi-billion dollar behemoths that can absolutely say this is the way Judy Warner (06:10.308) Yeah. Judy Warner (06:18.072) Right. Sean Patterson (06:30.262) all supply chain, you're gonna do it this way. We don't have that leverage between ourselves. And at the end of the day, lot of our, even our many are the equipment that we use is our mom and pop shops that are a lot of European and even in Taiwan and things like that, there's not like huge ones that are able to them, they themselves actually swing where we're at. So the CTO was created to focus on that across engineering to... really make sure we do more stuff like this and work with designers and using people like Jerry Partida, who you interview a lot, to go and help designers understand how their board will be manufactured so that you can design it better for a manufacturer, DFM. Judy Warner (07:19.414) Absolutely, and like give that, you know, the reason I came up with the Name the Ecosystem is the dream that we would have cross-functional visibility and understanding. But you know, we can dream, Sean, don't laugh at me, but this is what we wish we all had. And maybe, by the way, your passion project, I don't want to pivot too soon, is how do we leverage AI? Sean Patterson (07:29.705) Yeah. We can. Well. Judy Warner (07:45.684) in the factory, outside of the factory, as engineers? Like, how do you think? Am I jumping ahead here? I don't want to get ahead before you finished your thought. Sean Patterson (07:56.632) I think I can lead into it here, but because it's all symbiotic to I think what people are looking for, right? With the CTO role, it is this traditional PCB stuff, but we need to modernize it, right? We need to modernize it, we need to give career pathing, and we need to change how we think about things. And then there's this, my other part is CTO and head of AI, AI. Judy Warner (07:58.852) Okay. Judy Warner (08:11.043) Right. Sean Patterson (08:24.814) And even this conversation, I'm going to overuse the word and it's not, you know, it means many things to many different people. And depending on the applications, right? But what you have now is let's talk about this lack of industry 4.0 standards. I sort of view AI as it relates to not just the chat GPT kind of stuff, okay? When you actually put it into workflows. At the end of the day, a lot of time spent on computers, it's translating one data structure to another data structure. And for a very long time, we have had human doing that. When you don't have a heart at one API on some system to another API, and they're not hard and matched up, which requires phone call coordination and software development and all those kinds of things. And so we've always had humans kind of band-aid that, Well, now in LLM, in these kinds of other systems, Judy Warner (09:06.852) Mm-hmm. It's hard or impossible. Sean Patterson (09:19.938) They can be the ones that just, they're the ones that translate one data output to another data output. Okay. And so when we talk about industry 4.0, it is now getting to the point, and I'll give you a case, an example in a second, where using the knowledge that exists in these models through a chat GPT kind of interface, you can be taught with no knowledge whatsoever. how to do that industry 4.0 yourself. And therefore, you actually don't need, and because you have this LLM in the middle, you don't need to coordinate between my drill suppliers to my ERP and all these other things. I don't have to have all those companies come together. And you actually kind of don't need a standard when you don't have it at a high frequency level, when it's not information every half a second. You can instead put these things in the middle and that is what our industry needs. Certainly to move the needle as it relates to quality and throughput. And so AI can help you that. And I think that really plays also to what your design engineers that are listening to this podcast can kind of do. you now have the ability to learn and execute. Anything you've ever wanted to do if you're willing to be curious I think a little bit of systems thinking helps as well and and will that that aspect will absolutely grow even more But if you're if you are a curious person you now have a system and I don't care if I'll use chat you paid word a lot and that's only because it's good for beginners But there's chat you can see there's cloth. There's grok There's all these other things like I'm not I use all of them for for what they're good at and what they're good at changes every other day so Judy Warner (10:48.64) Absolutely. Sean Patterson (11:10.774) You now have the ability to ask it how to do this. you, you. Okay. So let me just give the example. So for internet of things, I've always been frustrated by how much people would charge for just like pH probes, industrial pH probes, and then like the cloud system that has to back it. mean, for small and medium businesses, manufacturers in particular, in the United States and in Europe, like you can't really afford it. And a lot of times at scale, doesn't necessarily actually drive the ROI based on how much you spent in the recurring SaaS costs. The SaaS model does not work for small and medium businesses. When we're in a contract. Judy Warner (11:45.24) Explain what you mean for our audience that doesn't understand a PH Pro. Give it little more background for that, will you? Sean Patterson (11:50.326) Yeah, so a pH probe in a plating tank. So something that just senses the pH level in a body of water. Judy Warner (11:57.55) So you know when to, when your chemicals are spent and you need to refresh your chemicals. Okay. Right. Sean Patterson (12:01.688) There's various reasons to ask it, but you're keeping your processes in control. We could even do it as like a temperature, just like a water temperature sensor that you maybe want for your home, something like that. To do that now, you don't need to be a hardware engineer. You can go on to a chat GPT, be good about your prompt and say, I'm trying to make a pH probe sensor that will be wireless. I want the data to be pre-processed. I'm just using words. about the words I'm using, get you there. Give me, want to order a list from Amazon. Okay. Give me, give me a shopping list for Amazon for the actual things that will all connect together. You know, which ones you just told me to buy. So give me a schematic for how to pin these things out. Okay. And people start to get worried about like how crazy that is, right? It's not like you're, effectively get a Lego build manual for this stuff. You don't actually need to know what you're doing, right? Judy Warner (12:31.715) Right. Judy Warner (12:54.66) Well, yeah, there's a lot of, you may be able to do this with Arduino or some open source things. So this is not breaking the rules here. Sean Patterson (13:00.686) Yeah, correct. Yeah. Generally, when you say, hey, let's keep it caught, keep the cost low, it's some Arduino type background or a pie. And then give me the code, right? So now it's an extension yourself. So give me the, give me the C code. If you know, don't even have to upload it, then ask it how to upload it. And for the most part, between a cut and paste back and forth, let me say, let me say this way from cutting and pasting back and forth, you can make that. And just as a proof of concept, I did that this weekend. Judy Warner (13:08.899) Right. Sean Patterson (13:29.89) The parts came yesterday, albeit I had to solder one part because I should have ordered it soldered, but I didn't. And so I had to put a a pin header on it. Look that up on ChatChip.tv for all I'm talking about. And it worked within 45 minutes. And I have, and I did it from like a blind, I know nothing kind of approach. The code worked right away, by the way. I just had to take one wire to the other and it gave me that pin out, right? It literally said, you know, port zero to port one on this one. Judy Warner (13:44.516) It's crazy. Sean Patterson (13:58.35) And it's a Lego instruction manual. Those things are possible now. And that's on the hardware side of things. So we can start to get into industry for it auto and put it in places that make sense to us without this large cost overhead. And by the way, then we also can get more. can get deeper into understanding what our processes are like because I don't need to pay another company how these absorbent and fees that really I got to get the ROI. Think about it ahead of time before just literally getting a 30 that was $30 on Amazon to do all of Whereas again, that same sensor system is about $700 and then you're tied to the cloud as well. And then you don't own your own data. The company that has the data, they're the ones that own it, right? So it's that kind of stuff. But that relates more also to your designer community. If you had these problems, you can solve them yourself. Judy Warner (14:37.636) Right. Judy Warner (14:46.276) Well, the way, let me just insert here really quick is the way that I see that design engineers have onboarded AI in the most meaningful way is embedded and spooling up Python code. They do it every day. They've tested it over and over again and it's putting out just really good, if not perfect code. And they're using that at scale. I see it everywhere. I'm not sure I have the insight for the other ways that they're leveraging it. I am, for our audience sake, I am really interested in how that's going to pack them besides the code. I mean, that was a great example where if you needed, say, a test board or something like to do in-house test or... Sean Patterson (15:32.396) Yeah. The biggest problem is people don't ever ask the question, right? Nobody asks the question. Like it's very, I've never had a system, the AI system tell me no. Now, has it been wrong occasionally? Yeah. It's, it's not the part about turning the keys over to AI. You are still a thought leader. It is the thought partner with you. I don't know how, where that goes out in the future, but it's not AI is taking people's jobs. It's the people that are using AI that are going to be so highly enhanced. Right? I mean, my software development teams using Judy Warner (15:51.234) Yeah. Sean Patterson (15:58.926) these kind of coding platforms now, which there's sort of, I'll say there's haters out on the internet and there's people that embrace it. I think if you can extrapolate and see where the world is going, you should be on the embrace it now because one, you'll be on the curve before the curve really, really inverts. And two, if it's doing 90, 95 % of the work that allows you to think at a much bigger level and orchestrate things. Okay. And, and, and arguably if you actually approach these systems right. which I have done just as a hobbyist level. It hasn't not worked yet. You just need to think about how to interact with it, right? Judy Warner (16:37.838) Well, I'm leveraging it right. you know, that's the thing that I was sort of stalking you, teasing you that I was stalking you is because you've been putting out these AI tips of the day kind of things. And you've turned me on to some juicy little nuggets that quite honestly I've used and leveraged. And I'm like, Ooh, I never thought of that one and tried it and it's worked out great. So I can tell you a hundred percent, I'm learning how to write a good prompt or query AI in just a slightly different way. Like the one you gave me was to ask it not just how to do the thing, but give me less obvious answers to the same questions or show me what I may not be considering. So it helps you like patch your blind spots and your natural prejudice towards a certain viewpoint. And your point about it's not taking your jobs. I like someone said recently, AI is not coming to take your job. It's coming to take your tasks, right? But you have to lead it. It's your strategy, it's your mind, it's your engineering intuition. It's like getting free help, you know? So I think it just has... Sean Patterson (17:43.874) That's fair. Yep. Sean Patterson (17:55.758) Yeah, you now have the best teacher in the world in your pocket and it will teach you the way you absorb information. And you just have to be specific with it. Hey, how can I learn to do this thing? And we'll teach you. And if you don't understand it then eventually you can dumb it down to say, teach it to me as if I was an eighth grader or ninth grader. And then heavily it always goes back to the lemonade stand example, especially if it's a business thing. But I think it helps people do these and learn, right? So. As it relates to design engineers and sort of just engineers, period, right? I think of these things in three pillars. One is sort of AI for everybody. That's the chat GPT kind of thing. But that should be something that you need to learn. You need to learn how to ask those questions correctly because you sort of get garbage in, garbage out. It's not actually, it's not garbage. You get simple in, you're going to get simple back. That's really, important. Judy Warner (18:48.068) Well, they're going to answer the question you gave them. So by broadening your question or changing it, you'll get out better information. Simple question, simple answer. Sean Patterson (18:58.254) Right, right. That's correct. Because the model is going to a simple high overview website in its kind of knowledge base, As opposed to specific experts areas. And so I think of this as sort of pillar one of AI for everyone. And I think that that is very important for all of us, regardless of what your actual job is. I think it's a necessary thing and something you'll actually find very, very useful if you use it in society broadly. And I think for engineers, particularly into what I sort of call AI workflows and agents, people kind of fight about this agent term a lot, but let's just talk about sort of instead of asking this thing, but you have it help you with emails. I'm giving a simple example. You learn how to get Track2BT to help you with an email. And now instead of you putting the email in there every time, Judy Warner (19:33.56) Yeah. Sean Patterson (19:47.054) you're now going to automate it when email received, then do this prompt because I really like the response from this thing over and over again. And now that's, that's, that's now an automation workflow because it's going off of some trigger that has nothing to do with me. Um, but I think engineers and design engineers, right? They still have all the other aspects besides just the actual design they're doing, right? They have to deal with their boss. They got to interview people, all these other things in pillars one and two, you can either automate a lot of that stuff or have it really be a partner with you, right? Think about like, hey, defining what you're using it, by the way, talking with it about defining what the best, if you're a manager in engineering, in design engineering, what's the best kind of persona of somebody I want to hire? Work with it to help define that. Just talk about the best persona and who you would really want to work with. And then after you're doing that, then say, great, now make me a job description of what that looks like. OK? Now it does a very good job description. And if you don't want to do the header of like, our company does blah, blah, then just cut and you know, just reference your own website and we'll scrape it and give the context. Okay. And then, and let's not talk about, let alone that you can automate a lot of the sort of recruiting, like outreach and things like that. Let's just say you get resumes in. Okay. Now you can say, Hey, here's the, here is the, the job description and here, are the resumes. And it will, you know, and Hey, work with me to find the best candidate out of that score these. Judy Warner (20:57.528) right. Sean Patterson (21:11.512) for me based on these criteria as well. Here's what I care about. A, B, C, D, you know, certainly Adopt Scripts, it helps you, but you can kind of rank them and you're ranking them just with words, no code. And then once you're happy with that and you want to say, all right, I'm going to bring this candidate in, say, hey, this candidate's coming in, write me a list of questions to flush out the areas that I don't think are coming out in the resume. Or if I'm suspect, right? And it can help you with those questions. Again, I think it is certainly lazy to always just say, well, I'm just going to take the output. Judy Warner (21:33.08) Mmm. Sean Patterson (21:40.782) and go with what it is. You should be reading it, you should be understanding it, you should be working with it. And by the way, the more you do that, the better outcomes you get later on because it kind of learned. You're not changing the model, you're changing the context that the model understands about you as an individual. So that's a simple example where design engineers can then focus more on the thing that they probably really want to do, which was doing the design engineer, not all this arguably HR kind of, know, HR or whatever you want to call it kind of stuff. Or I have to have a tough conversation with an employee, right? Judy Warner (21:45.316) course. Judy Warner (22:01.133) Yes. Sean Patterson (22:09.108) Or I'm struggling with even peer to peer. Let's take out of the manager side. I'm struggling with this other employee. want you, this is what they're doing. This is, and you could try to talk through it. Like let's act, have them act as that other employee. And you can have that conversation ahead of time to help, you know, figure to help sort of arrive at the place you're trying to get. And it helps you at the end of the day, build as an individual at just in the workforce period. And I think, you know, so doesn't need to just be always about the design. When you start to get into the pure design part of like, how do you automate some of those tasks? That gets into what I would call some pillar two kind of stuff, but really pillar three, where you have competitive advantage by using more specific tools or training models to help you out. And there are certainly startups that are kind of doing things that connect components automatically. There's like Flex AI and things like that, right? Sorry, Flex AI. And there's other ones out there. Yeah, but. Judy Warner (23:00.964) There are so many, I wanted to insert here something my audience, because I've been bringing all the AI sort of base tools that I'm seeing. And that's a whole nother department, right? That is in parallel. So you as a design engineer, design manager, whatever it is that you're doing, this is to help you personally be more productive. And by the way, you get to go home and watch your kids soccer game or whatever it is. Sean Patterson (23:12.974) Yeah. Sean Patterson (23:28.214) Yes, that is true. Very true. Judy Warner (23:30.636) I think quality of life, I mean, I know I'm a woman and so I think a little differently, but I think it's gonna give engineers some of their time back because the complexity of the things they're handling, like let's get over the spreadsheets, you guys. Like the spreadsheets need to die, right? And we have AI now, plus we have emerging tools that are leveraging AI so you don't have to do that. Sean Patterson (23:34.67) Yeah. Sean Patterson (23:40.846) history. Sean Patterson (23:48.27) That's right. Yes. Sean Patterson (23:59.424) It is, it's totally true. What you're saying is absolutely true. I definitely, I go home more now at five 30 than I ever have before. And that is because I am being much more productive in my day. using a being assisted by these tools. Now, can every job do that without the proper tools? No, I think design engineering is a great point there, but what I started with this whole pH probe example or whatever, it doesn't matter what example it is and what Judy Warner (24:00.45) I think that's opportunity. Yeah. Judy Warner (24:10.636) Isn't that great? Sean Patterson (24:27.63) you know, companies are trying to figure out how to connect, you know, components automatically and things like that. I'm telling design engineers work with this work with chat GPT. Then you can get into the kind of things like cursor. I'm a big fan of cursor, which is a software development environment. You don't need to know software to get into these things. You can create the things that you see as threats to your own career from, from an outside point of view, like some of these automated systems, you can make those yourself and telling you if you are curious and, and Don't sort of give up. You do not need a degree in any of this stuff. don't even need, you don't even have have gone to a class for any of this stuff. You can be very crisp about what the problem is, which is the key. Do not lead it to solutions. Be very crisp about what the problem is and stick with it in a chat GPT kind of environment to define this. And then it can break it down to the steps for how to do this. How do I set up a server? How do I maybe think about Judy Warner (25:10.436) key. Sean Patterson (25:24.536) connecting A to B for these outputs. And then you say, well, it gets more fancy than that. You have to really have specific models. you don't know, you don't need a machine learning scientist to do that anymore. You can say, how do I, this is what I want to do. And if you're good, you can go to rent some GPUs on the cloud and it will teach you how to do this, the fine tuning or the model development itself for the crazy thing you're trying to do. Cause you will run into that in this space. You will run into the space where This is beyond the general models of chat GPT and things like that. But you, every individual in the world with curiosity and substance thinking can do, frankly, anything they want as long as they keep on, keep that curiosity up and not giving up. And so you don't need to feel threatened by those ones. You can use them to enhance your job, but you can also make your own that is more proprietary, if you will, to yourself and deliver that value for your company and or your own time. to your point. Judy Warner (26:21.386) And you can, you know, if you're really fancy, you can get your own servers, you know, inside or leverage your own servers inside your company and keep all that IP protected, which is of course top of mind, especially for companies like Milaero companies, like security, reliability, like people's lives are at stake here. And I'm encouraged that I think we're moving in that direction. But the margins have been too slim for too long in our industry to do some of these things. And I think this really opens an opportunity to preserve the profit margins while doing it more securely and reliably. And then the tools are coming up. So I feel like we are in an exciting time and it's hard to track all that. Well, and what Summit is doing to leverage these modern tools to your already, I believe I'm Sean Patterson (26:59.022) That's very true. Sean Patterson (27:07.534) That's Judy Warner (27:17.656) bias because I've known a lot of you for a long time. There's absolutely a culture of excellence and like decades of knowledge and wisdom represented inside the summit team. however, that you guys are embracing the use of this tool to even take that up a notch, I think is going to be a real differentiator for you and also help you be more valuable. I mean, way I think of it is like, many conversations have me and Jerry Partida had about DFM? Don't do this with your VIAs. When you put connectors on the edge, turn this off. And then we want them to go take that in from a podcast, apply it over here, and send it to Jerry. And then Jerry's got to call them back. It's still... based on such a physical world model instead of sort of connecting the super intelligence that can just fast track you to that place. And then you have those real people to help you tweak and build those bridges together. But I mean, from the way we were doing it five years ago to now is other worldly to me. And I think Summit and you are on the cutting edge of that for our industry. And you know, which is why I wanted to have you on. Sean Patterson (28:34.796) Yeah. Judy Warner (28:42.2) Why don't you take a moment and tell people, because I'm sure design engineers have listened to a few things that you've said and they're like, I want to know more about that. And certainly they can connect with you on LinkedIn or reach out to Summit. But I know you've started sort of an AI community online. Why don't you take a moment and tell folks about that? So if they want to tap into that too, to be better design engineers and work well with Summit, tell them where they can tap into that. Sean Patterson (29:11.788) Yeah, I certainly on LinkedIn follow me. I'm talking about things that we're thinking about internally and just sharing, just teaching, right? I think there's sort of, know, summit brand we're trying to build around those kinds of things. And I also found it helpful that maybe ties a little bit back to what you talked about, you know, bringing sort of technologies back to your own servers. Okay. If you asked me a year ago, I would told you we would be running, we're running towards the cloud. we're trying to get off on-prem. If you ask me today, I'm saying we're going on-prem. And that is because with the Admin.ai, if you even sort of blip anything out on the internet, these things are out there sucking up information all the time. And now you don't need to just have... Somebody in the past, if you were Googling something, you had to ask a question in the way that somebody asked that question before and answered it. Now you don't need to do that. Now it sort of can formulate that. so private information can be quickly sucked up into the models in a very specific manner that nobody needs to specifically ask about to get to that matter. They can just kind of show up. And so as it relates to kind of bringing things back again, like so it was cloud, maybe I'm saying we need to go back. I think the same thing happens almost with social media in some ways, right? Judy Warner (30:20.067) Right. Sean Patterson (30:32.494) It's clutter is already starting to happen. There's a lot of AI-ness out there where it's kind cluttering feeds and content's not always the best and things like that. It's of lazy people that are sort of outsourcing without being thought partnering. Sorry, they're not leading the AI. They're just trying to make a quick buck with clicks. So I think that then lends itself to communities, whether they're local communities. And I have the best conversations by just going to local meetups in Southern California on these things. Judy Warner (30:40.312) Mm-hmm. Judy Warner (30:49.079) Right. Sean Patterson (30:59.574) And we're sharing sort of as humans again, because you kind of want to get off the phone in some ways. And so community, it's all about community. Judy Warner (31:03.982) Totally and I have predicted Sean that AI is going to push us towards humanity not pull us further apart like it's Really? Okay Sean Patterson (31:12.157) It's true. I have the same thought, But that's the optimistic view of all this. There is a pessimistic one that... Judy Warner (31:18.53) Yeah, well, that's my inclination anyways. If we don't, Sean, we're gonna all become cyborgs. Like we kind of already are and it's like we have mental health issues. This is not good. I'll just talk about myself. Me sitting in front of a keyboard all day doing this does not enrich my life. Like I need to find my people, you know, and like I need human. Sean Patterson (31:25.623) Yeah. Judy Warner (31:45.888) I need sunshine in humans and I think it's gonna, and I think there's a lot of magic when those people, when we come together as human beings and talk about these things and how to use it rather than be used by it. Sean Patterson (31:53.624) Okay, yep. Sean Patterson (31:58.286) That's correct. And there's sort of these arguments, you say the future winds up being, you know, the four-day workweek and then the three-day workweeks, or maybe it's like the WALL-E movie or Ready Player One. I'm not sure where things go. I don't think it's overtly dystopian, but there certainly is social, probably disorders that happen as a result of people that are able to adopt these for various reasons and not. But as it relates to the community, you know, I was saying sort of coming back to this community, I found that I just created a... just the community for people that are sort of just tangential to my ecosphere to just share ideas, right? And not have to be cluttered by social media, right? And so it's not something that I'm not, don't like post it and things like that. That's not the point. It's only people that want to share and learn like you and I are doing and you know, I know you're in it. It's just to share that information, right? It's not, it's literally you can send the, anybody can start these things. Judy Warner (32:37.486) Right. Judy Warner (32:46.103) Mm-hmm. Sean Patterson (32:53.824) And it's just forums, the old school forums of just sharing information, but you're doing it with people that just not the internet at large. it's people that are, again, for the one I have that are tangential to me, but I've been in PCB manufacturing. I've been in Amazon and middle mile logistics, as well as healthcare. I've been in the U S Navy and submarines. I've done a couple of startup stuff, did 3d printing. And so you're sort of, seeing sort of different people throughout my career kind of come together and share on this. Judy Warner (32:57.815) is cool. Sean Patterson (33:22.146) And that's all it is. Like it's just, it's just a platform for sharing. But I think it helps me think about how, what I see people asking about and sharing about helped me think about what I can do for my own company and drive that value. I don't think anything, nobody's sharing like proprietary into stuff. You're always in this pillar one stuff of things that everybody should be learning about. Yeah. Judy Warner (33:41.26) Yeah, it is that first pillar that you've talked about where it's AI for everybody and maybe just getting an idea, you know, that you hadn't thought of before. Anyways, I jumped right in and for our audience, if that's something of interest to you, like jump in. What is the name of that? I'll put the link in the show notes, but Shawn, why you share the link both to Summit Interconnect because I'm sure people love to deal with that. company that is so forward thinking on their boards, but what's also the URL or? Sean Patterson (34:15.64) The community forum is called CrossGen.ai, CrossGen-ai.com. And you can just enter the community from there and then you see what everybody shared. And again, it's just sort of an open sharing community. Again, trying to get out of the social media worlds and stuff like that. You're pigeon-eating whatever content you want. But it's really good for cross-generated, by the way. That's the pitch. It's cross-gen, across generations. And so we're trying to take the... Judy Warner (34:19.459) Okay. Judy Warner (34:28.024) Okay. Yeah, and I'm just saying I Sean Patterson (34:42.2) For those that are hesitant to kind of learn AI, particularly those that are longer in their careers, things like that, if you have a lot of experience in your career and you can pivot to using these tools, you are the most valuable person in the world right now. The younger, less experienced junior community, while they can adopt this stuff well, they don't know the problem to solve. Judy Warner (35:04.141) Right. Sean Patterson (35:04.598) Right. whereas the individual has experience, knows the problem to solve. And if they're able to adopt that, those are the people that are doing 100x output, whereas the junior people are more like 10x. And I think that's lost a bunch of people. And so I'm trying to bridge that generational gap of having the young teach the old and the old kind of get curious and figure things out. But it's just people sharing their own experiences within the forum. It's nothing fancy. Judy Warner (35:19.116) Hm, clever. Judy Warner (35:30.626) Well, I like it and for our listeners, if you don't have time to go check out the show notes, just find Sean Peterson from Summit Interconnect on LinkedIn. And he posts these daily things and like, I'm beginning to look forward to him like, ooh, what's next? And it might be a change in the algorithm or it might just be a little tip of the day or, you know, that you can just, you're on LinkedIn, right? That's it. And so to me, I, Sean Patterson (35:53.774) I'm just sharing things that I run into, quite frankly, and that's all I expect other people to do. There's no, you know. Judy Warner (36:00.478) use LinkedIn pretty heavily for the ecosystem. So it's like a no brainer. Like you're there anyways and the algorithm serves you up in my feed, which I'm happy about. So that's a really easy way. Same with Summit. Summit has a company page there. Summit has great learning resources on their website, by the way. So it's also, I'll put all that below and you can take a deep dive, but if you don't do anything else, fine, Sean. Sean Patterson (36:12.898) Yeah. Judy Warner (36:28.32) and find Summit on LinkedIn and that should put you on a good path. Well, we could talk for at least another hour and half, at least I could talk to you. I know, I know just it was ridiculous prepping for this call because we definitely started down the rabbit hole. But I think you're really onto something and that you're thinking about this in my beloved PCB fabrication world. Sean Patterson (36:37.644) I think we do all the time though, Judy, outside of these podcasts. Judy Warner (36:56.612) is just such a breath of air because I've written, you know, since before dot com and beyond, you know, I've seen this industry get decimated to the peril. I think of a lot of design engineers, particularly prototyping are really high complexity boards and you know, that that we can really make a pivot and find a gain here is very exciting for me personally. And then on a fun side, you know, applying the things that your community sharing for my own work has been really great. So, well, thank you for that. Sean, any last thoughts before I let you go? Sean Patterson (37:36.142) No, again, just, I think it's important for people to think about these things that are in the future of where AI is headed. Judy Warner (37:42.724) stop stop stop. Eli I'm so sorry we went long can you bounce out and then I'll be right with you. We went too long sorry. Eli this is Sean from Summit this is Eli he's a phenomenal engineer. Okay sorry buddy same link. Judy Warner (38:04.246) Okay, let me ask you that question again. Well, Sean, this has been a great conversation. Any last thoughts before I let you go? Sean Patterson (38:12.236) Yeah, know, I, so again, I told you we're going to up using the word AI a lot. I think that, look, understanding these things for your own career is good for your own personal life is great. How you employ them in a business manner, you need to think about. But learning is the critical thing right now. It is a time of great change. Nobody went to school. There's like people that went to school to train models, but nobody went to school for the application of AI. If you think that that is the trajectory, then you need to be learning like you've never learned before. By the way, I can help you with that. And then figuring out how you apply that in a business manner to make money. That's the key, right? And you're going to be able to pull these things off the shelf and have it do your job for you. That's not the point. It's the point is to work with it to understand how you can add value like we're trying to do at Summit. of how do I now get my IoT sensors out there because we don't have standards in our industry. And we can do these things where I don't need to hire 10,000 experts to do it. We're doing things that are more straightforward. If there's knowledge around it, you can figure it out. And then if you really want to, in time, get into that pillar three of that's very proprietary to you, then you can. really help your company out and grow it, or you could start your own company because you have such a great tool. And getting to that tool one has nothing to do with skill. It's about will and curiosity. It really is. And I think the more you work with it, you'll find that these things, these things were very useful for helping work with your manufacturing partners to get your products more. to get your product through DFM, right? And kind of ask these questions at a time. And you mentioned Jerry, Jerry uses this a lot, especially when it gets in the areas that Jerry doesn't have experience in, where certain types of like heat fluxes and things like that, where we're just, we're kind of maybe not have a big base on it, but through the use of the tools, he's actually able to speak in areas that he may not be a pure expert in. And instead of grabbing somebody else to come in, we can answer those questions more easily. Judy Warner (39:43.948) Right. Sean Patterson (40:09.374) with the information that we have at the tip of our fingers. So I encourage everybody to do it. some it's going that way. Appreciate the good conversation again, Judy, as always. Judy Warner (40:22.648) Well, you're stuck with me now, buddy, and hoping our listeners will connect with you and get on the ride with me and also the amazing things you're doing at Summit. So congratulations on the job change and all the exciting things you're doing. And I'll be sure to put all the links in the show notes and promise me my friend will come back and we'll have more case studies for design engineers and sort of that bridge between design engineering and, and Sean Patterson (40:25.614) You Judy Warner (40:51.906) actually bare board shops to help them do that DFM. I think this is going to be a game changer. Sean Patterson (40:54.03) Yes. Absolutely. Judy Warner (41:00.206) For our listeners, please go check out the show notes. I'll give you lots of good resources there. And as I said, push the easy button. Go connect with Sean Patterson or Summit Interconnect Technology on LinkedIn and join the journey with us. Thank you for joining us today. We'll see you next week. Until then, remember to always stay connected to the ecosystem. OK, and that's a wrap.