We spent an afternoon with senior leaders from across BC, and heard a straight account from the president of a Canadian manufacturer about where the business is going next.
Tyler Frans opened by asking who in the room had been surprised by something AI did for them in the past month. Almost every hand went up. What followed was an hour with André Lalande, six months into the job as the first externally hired president in Taymor’s history, and Ben Guanzon, who has run IT there for a decade, on what it has actually taken to get a 78-year-old family-owned manufacturer moving on AI without breaking what already works.
Left to right: André Lalande, President of Taymor Industries; Tyler Frans, Founder and CEO of Sense & Motion; Ben Guanzon, Director of Information Technology at Taymor.
Three years ago the direction was simple: we need AI, go get AI. Ben pushed back: understand what you are trying to achieve first, and structure the data so it can be served to AI correctly. No AI, then, until Taymor had a proper data warehouse, and what came out had to be 100% correct for a salesperson on the road. That groundwork carries the first use case: a chatbot in Teams answering project and order questions without leaving the network.
André arrived from Honeywell, where internal AI agents had been running for years, and came to talk about what he called the art of the possible. His read on it: AI did not replace HR there, it redefined the function. The mundane questions went to the machine, and HR managers became business partners. His point for the room was that you do not have to be a 60,000-employee company to deploy the same basic concepts.
Copilot went to managers first. André called it giving them just enough rope: a safe space to be dangerous, with honest feedback as the signal for what a wider rollout would look like. There is a sandbox open to anyone at the company alongside it, with what comes out of it still checked by a person. The written policy is deliberately still a draft. Every step has to clear a business case, and if it does not, the answer is not no, it is not yet.
We don’t want to apply AI to the current process. Everybody just kind of hangs on to what they have. We need to apply AI based on a better enhanced process to actually move the needle.
Ben Guanzon, Director of Information Technology, Taymor Industries
If the data groundwork, the adoption problem or the business case sounds like where you are right now, we would like to hear about it. Tell us what you are trying to move and we will talk through a first step.
