By Matt Healy, Director of Emerging Technologies, MassMEP
Every shop has one. The machinist who can hear a spindle going bad through a closed door. The maintenance tech who knows the third press needs a quarter turn past spec when the humidity climbs. The setup guy whose numbers are always a little different from the print, and always right.
None of it is written down. Most of it has never been said out loud to anyone under 40.
That person is retiring.
I spend most of my time on shop floors across the Commonwealth, and this comes up in nearly every conversation I have with an owner or a plant manager. Not as a strategic concern. As a date on a calendar. Someone is leaving in fourteen months and nobody has figured out what to do about it.
The instinct is usually to hire early and overlap. That helps, and it is expensive, and it assumes you can find the replacement. It also assumes the retiring employee is good at teaching, which is a separate skill from being good at the work. Plenty of exceptional technicians are terrible at explaining what they do, because after thirty years they are not thinking in steps anymore. They are just doing it.
So the knowledge stays in one head until the head walks out.
What has changed is the cost of capturing it.
Documenting expertise used to mean pulling someone off the floor to sit with a technical writer and produce a procedure nobody reads. Slow, expensive, and in direct competition with getting parts out the door. Which is why, in most shops, it never happened.
Now the capture step can be a phone propped on a toolbox.
Record the experienced employee doing the work and narrating as they go. Feed that video to an AI tool. What comes back is a structured, step-by-step procedure, in minutes, that you can put in front of a new hire. Translate it into whatever languages your floor actually speaks and you have removed a second barrier at the same time. Go one step further and that same material becomes something an operator can ask questions of at the machine, at 2 a.m., on second shift, when there is nobody to call.
That is the real shift. Not better documentation. Documentation that answers back.
I want to be careful here, because this is where technology conversations usually get oversold.
AI does not create expertise. It captures and redistributes it. If the person you record explains the wrong way to do something, you have just industrialized the wrong way at scale. What comes out of that video is a draft, not an SOP. It needs the same employee, or a trusted peer, to read it and mark it up. If you are not willing to budget for that review step, skip the project.
Second, that video and everything derived from it describe how you actually make your product. That is competitive information. Decide where it lives and who can reach it before you record anything, and if you are using a free consumer AI tool, read what it does with your uploads.
Third, and this is the one that sinks most attempts, the technology does not solve the human part. An employee who feels like they are recording their own replacement will give you a thin, careful, useless walkthrough. They will skip the part where they tap the fixture. The framing has to be honest and it has to be respectful: we want your name on how this gets done for the next twenty years. Attaching a title or a stipend to it works considerably better than issuing a mandate.
None of this requires a platform decision, a capital request, or a consultant. It requires picking one person and one process.
Here is what I would do this month. Identify the single employee whose retirement would hurt most. Ask them to name the one task they are most worried nobody else can handle. Record them doing it start to finish, talking the whole way through. Run the video through whatever AI tool you already have access to and ask it for a step-by-step procedure. Then hand that draft back to them with a red pen.
You will learn more in that hour about what is capturable and what is not than you will from any vendor demo. And however rough the result, you will have more of that person’s knowledge on Monday than you had on Friday.
The retirements are already on the calendar. The recording is the part we control.