For you, and I'd say the whole HN audience, it is quite obvious that spending money in an AI approach would be extremely useful. For a steel producer, this is n

For you, and I'd say the whole HN audience, it is quite obvious that spending money in an AI approach would be extremely useful. For a steel producer, this is not obvious at all, and consider it a long shot. I would even bet that the idea of whoever organized the hackaton was not to get free labor, but to prove to someone up there that AI can bring new interesting solutions. In view of the results, I'm quite sure they will be spending more in the future, maybe even starting a new department or a serious research program or something like that in the long term.