Overlooking the shop floor at Industrial Scientific — where workers create technologies like portable gas detectors to prevent hazardous conditions on job sites — six new employees huddle before a screen for training.
But they’re not going to be focused on the same things as the other 400 or so workers at the Robinson-based firm, whose offices overlook the Parkway West.
They’re part of a new “Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics” center, also known as “The Fort,” being spearheaded by Fortive, the company that purchased Industrial Scientific in summer 2017.
The aim is to take masses of data that Everett, Wash.-based Fortive collects from its portfolio companies to generate new insights for products and services that would otherwise be impossible. These new hires will observe what customers need to accelerate growth, and then prototype and experiment until they’ve created the right fix.
That could be anything from better understanding employee turnover to creating new algorithms that can detect when a machine may need to be recalibrated.
“We went around the world, literally, to look for a place to set this up,” said Barbara Hulit, senior vice president at Fortive. She said the company began thinking about the new AI and data hub about a year and a half ago.
Austin, Boston and other tech hubs across the world weren’t quite the right fit, she said. Given Fortive’s aligned mission to create industrial equipment, it made sense to headquarter the center at Industrial Scientific, Ms. Hulit said.
Close relationships with Carnegie Mellon University professors, renowned for their artificial intelligence research and education programs, didn’t hurt.
While the employees at The Fort are part of a small group, they join a wider landscape of huge firms basing artificial intelligence research in Pittsburgh.
There’s the Bosch Research and Technology Center at 3 Crossings in the Strip District, which is expected to grow to about 20 AI experts in 2019. Last May, Facebook announced it was setting up an AI research shop at CMU. Even the U.S. Army has opened a new Artificial Intelligence Task Force at the National Robotics Engineering Center in Lawrenceville.
Fortive says it doesn’t require a huge infusion of new talent like some of those other companies.
“If you think about Uber, we don’t need hundreds of workers ... every hire here is precious,” Ms. Hulit said.
Fortive’s center will certainly expand over time, she said.
Ms. Hulit imagines the team will grow “in multiples” and eventually expand to some of Fortive’s other operating companies across the globe, depending on which portfolio companies show most demand.
Some of those include Teletrac Navman, a Glenview, Ill.-based company that uses data to track location, fuel level and more for truck fleets; Anderson-Negele, a company in Fultonville, N.Y., that provides hygienic solutions and services for food and beverage processors, as well as life sciences products; and Greenville, S.C.-based Gordian, which builds construction information platforms for business analysis.
In the meantime, the six employees at The Fort — along with a few contractors and CMU interns — will continue to train and learn from professors at Carnegie Mellon to create a pipeline of future AI and data workers.
“Our demand and our need for data and AI systems will only grow,” Ms. Hulit said.
The new center overlooks that shop floor at Industrial Scientific for a reason.
“This ties us in, it’s where the operations happen,” Ms. Hulit said. “We don’t want to be in an ivory tower somewhere.”
Courtney Linder: clinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1707. Twitter: @LinderPG.
First Published: April 10, 2019, 11:30 a.m.
Updated: April 10, 2019, 12:09 p.m.
