Manufacturing environments are unique and deeply customized, supported by small IT teams and legacy technology and skill sets. Successful implementation of artificial intelligence in this environment requires customization, consideration for privacy protection, and easily-understood, actionable outputs. Both the hardware and software frameworks for machine learning and computer vision are now at a point to meet this challenge. Where implementation used to be a major undertaking, it is now a feasible cost. The result: manufacturers must harness this technology now to remain competitive. Using machine learning for computer vision, manufacturers can catch twice as many defects on their production line, in a fraction of the time, improving on the accuracy and speed of human quality inspection by several orders of magnitude. Lloyd Clark is an expert in artificial intelligence and machine learning and co-founder of BlueRidge Al, a visual inspection and defect detection solution for manufacturing.