FORWARD-DEPLOYED AI · CSI AUTOMATION

AI that ships to your plant floor —
not to a slide deck.

Twenty-seven years of PLCs, SCADA, and 2 a.m. commissioning calls — now fused with a working agentic-AI practice. I embed with your team, remote-first, and build automation that survives contact with production.

Book the AI-Readiness Assessment or email support@csiautomation.ai

Why AI pilots die in manufacturing

It's not the models. It's the gap between the people who know AI and the people who know your process. I've stood on both sides of it.

FAULT 01The Translation GapData scientists who've never walked a line don't know what a historian tag, an alarm flood, or a safety interlock mean — so they build demos, not tools.
FAULT 02Pilot PurgatoryThe proof-of-concept works in a sandbox and dies at the MOC review, because nobody designed for production from day one.
FAULT 03OT Fear (justified)Your controls team is right to keep chatbots away from anything that moves. AI belongs read-only first, human-gated always, nowhere near the safety PLC.
The fix is a role, not a product: a forward-deployed engineer who speaks ladder logic AND large language models — accountable for one production win, not a deck of possibilities.

The engagement ladder

Fixed scope, plain prices, each stage earns the next. Remote-first: your technician is my hands; your historian and MES exports are my eyes.

$3,500 · FIXED · 2 WEEKS

1 · AI-Readiness Assessment

A commissioning-grade survey of where AI actually pays in your operation.

  • Data & systems walkdown (historian, MES/ERP, maintenance logs, alarms)
  • Ranked use-case register with honest ROI ranges
  • OT-safe integration architecture (read-only first, human-gated writes)
  • Fixed-price proposal for the first production win
FROM $8,000/MO · 60–90 DAYS

2 · Integration Sprint

One use-case, taken all the way to production — not to a demo.

  • Agentic pipeline built on your data flows
  • Weekly working sessions with your team (they learn it as it's built)
  • Hard cost governors and observability from day one
  • Handover documentation your next engineer can actually run
FROM $2,000/MO · PER SITE

3 · Managed Agentic Ops

I keep the fleet healthy after it ships.

  • Monitoring, model updates, drift and cost review
  • Monthly improvement cycle — one tuned loop at a time
  • Your team grows into ownership; I engineer myself out

I run this on myself, every day

My own operation is run by an agentic fleet I built: a pre-market risk sentinel, a nightly knowledge-base pipeline with hard query caps, retry-hardened publishing automation, a cost governor that once caught a silent $500/month leak, and a full-duplex ops channel to my phone. Read-only by default, human-gated writes, fail-loud alerts. That same discipline — the one that keeps my systems safe at 2 a.m. — is what I bring to yours. Read the M.A.X. case study for the full architecture and numbers.

Design rule I won't break: AI reads everything, recommends often, and writes to production only through a human hand — until months of boring reliability say otherwise.
For system integrators
Your site relationship. My AI bench. I white-label behind CSIA-member integrators as your forward-deployed AI engineer — you keep the customer, the travel, and the markup; your clients get agentic AI from someone who respects an MOC. First assessment for integrator partners at a founder rate. Talk partnership →
Who's behind this
Enrique "Hank" Vazquez — electrical & controls engineer: 27 years of PLCs, DCS, SCADA, instrumentation, and startups, now building agentic-AI systems daily. I write about the overlap at The Control Narrative. Plant floors call me Hank; it carries better over a running compressor.