There comes a point in every B2B SaaS startup’s life when you feel the irresistible urge to host a customer event. There are many good reasons to do it. In our case, we did it because we love spending time with our potential customers and exchanging knowledge with them. We thought Austin would be a great place to host it. Tuesday, August 21st, was a hot day down there. Just perfect for a few cool drinks at the Roosevelt Room in downtown Austin and some good conversation about cowboy boots, BBQ, and Artificial Intelligence.
Plutoshift hosted this event for the Industrial team at Carollo Engineers. Their group came from all over the United States and Plutoshift had plenty to talk about. However, the topic of water was never too far away. Plutoshift’s Northern California location led to discussing wine, but eventually found it’s way to novel water reuse solutions at California vineyards. The topic of fishing somehow led to desalination plants, and skiing led to … wait for it … après-ski drinks, which led to reverse osmosis membranes in ethanol plants. Yes, the experts at Carollo care about their work.
The event, apart from giving us a chance to get to know each other, was an opportunity for the Carollo team to learn the latest in implementing machine learning and asset performance management from Plutoshift. We shared our latest work with Carollo and discussed how to take this into future projects. We touched on the advantages of a revenue-centric APM approach and also some of the challenges industrial water and wastewater companies have with implementing machine learning solutions.
Among the challenges we discussed was the lack of open source data. One thing that has put this industry behind others is the anonymous sharing of data from processes. This collaborative sharing is the key to accelerating the adoption of machine learning. Other industries, including energy, have formal programs to facilitate this type of data sharing to the betterment of the industry as a whole.
To wrap up the night, we had a frank conversation about how data sharing might be initiated. There were some good ideas that were exchanged and better still, there was enthusiasm to pursue those ideas. Perhaps the Roosevelt Room will be remembered as the launchpad for this very important component to bring revenue-centric APM approach to industrial water and wastewater plants in the future.
