{"id":8408,"date":"2026-08-11T01:00:30","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T07:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=8408"},"modified":"2026-07-21T15:08:52","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T21:08:52","slug":"ai-and-six-sigma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/ai-and-six-sigma\/","title":{"rendered":"AI and Six Sigma"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;ve been attending ASQ Lean Six Sigma conferences and attending sessions on AI. Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve learned.<\/p>\r\n<p><em>Download my free ebook, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/pdf\/Agile-Process-Innovation.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Agile Process Innovation &#8211; Hacking Lean Six Sigma for Results<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/1206534893?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;Let&#8217;s talk about AI for a minute. I&#8217;m Jay Arthur, author of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Lean-Six-Sigma-Demystified-Second\/dp\/0071749098\/\">Lean Six Sigma Demystified,<\/a>\u201d \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Lean-Six-Sigma-Hospitals-Improving\/dp\/1259641082\/\">Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals<\/a>\u201d and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/demo\/\">QI Macros [software]<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve been to a lot of conferences. I&#8217;ve gone to a lot of presentations on AI, and they all say, &#8220;Here&#8217;s what AI is,&#8221; but I haven&#8217;t seen any real good case studies and examples of what people are using it for.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;All right, so here&#8217;s what I do know. In what I&#8217;ve been learning over the last few years, I find that I can use AI like Claude or Chat GPT as a free virtual assistant who has hundreds of advanced degrees in all kinds of stuff, right? And I can ask them to go do research. I can ask them to take a statistical paper from some journal and tell it to me in simple English. \u201cCome on, boil this down and make it simple\u201d or \u201cTake that and export that into an Excel spreadsheet so I can see what the formulas and calculations are.\u201d It&#8217;ll do all kinds of stuff.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve had it come up with code for stuff on the website; interfacing with the postal service APIs. They&#8217;ll code, too. I don&#8217;t have to do all that crap anymore. I don&#8217;t have to go look at 3,000 websites and try and find the answer to the thing I&#8217;m looking for. It seems to know how to go find that, which is very handy.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Now, one of the things I want you to think about is yes, in Quality 5.0, I think AI is going to sit on top of most of the assembly lines and run them all. [AI will] look at all the charts\u2019 output and determine if something&#8217;s going on and make adjustments or stop the line and change out a drill&#8230; I don&#8217;t know. It&#8217;s going to do all kinds of stuff. So there&#8217;s going to be very few people actually working on assembly lines.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I was at one beer manufacturer and there was one guy sitting in a booth, a big bubble like a helicopter [cockpit] from M*A*S*H, right? He was running three or four bottling and canning lines simultaneously, right? Bottles and cans are coming down, they&#8217;re getting filled, they&#8217;re getting labeled, they&#8217;re getting capped, they\u2019re getting put into boxes and put onto loading pallets and somebody comes along every so often with a forklift and takes off a pallet. This is manufacturing of the future. If you think a lot of jobs are going to come back, I don&#8217;t see a line job. I see a smart job. I see AI jobs. I see lots of other jobs coming. And so I believe that AI is going to be helpful, but it&#8217;s not going to kill anything. You know, I saw one article that said, &#8220;Will AI survive a confrontation with a spreadsheet?&#8221; And that&#8217;s how they&#8217;re going to win. But we haven&#8217;t seen anybody do that yet.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So I want you to get this idea that you&#8217;re still going to be needed to solve problems using data. And the QI Macros automate a lot of things that used to be complex. We have some programmatic AI, which means I took what I knew, programmed it into software to do things automatically. And so far, I don&#8217;t think AI is going to kill me anytime soon. So start using AI as a virtual friend, a virtual assistant who can do all kinds of stuff: read legal documents, tell you what&#8217;s going on, where it could be wrong, give you some ideas about better language&#8230; I mean, lots of ways. You know, I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and this is like science magic to me, right? So, it\u2019s taken me a while to learn what kind of questions I can ask that AI can give me answers to to help me with what I do.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So, that&#8217;s my improvement insight for this week. Start using AI, but don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s going to blow up your job. My wife and I often talk about [how they used to say that] personal computers are going to take everyone&#8217;s job. Computers are going to take everyone&#8217;s job. The internet is going to take everyone&#8217;s job, and on and on and on and on and on. Guess what? Didn&#8217;t happen. Just created more jobs. And I believe AI is going to create more jobs as well. But it&#8217;s going to create jobs that require more education, more tolerance, more whatever, and free the rest of us up to solve problems that are created by all these things.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Let&#8217;s go out and improve something this week.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&rsquo;ve been attending ASQ Lean Six Sigma conferences and attending sessions on AI. Here&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;ve learned. Download my free ebook, Agile Process Innovation &ndash; Hacking Lean Six Sigma for Results. &#65279; &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s talk about AI for a minute. I&rsquo;m Jay Arthur, author of &ldquo;Lean Six Sigma Demystified,&rdquo; &ldquo;Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals&rdquo; and QI [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290,1],"tags":[572,629,170],"class_list":["post-8408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-improvement-insights","category-jay-arthur-blog","tag-qi","tag-qimacros","tag-six-sigma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8408"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8473,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8408\/revisions\/8473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}