In this talk, Cédric Geslin, in charge of key account business development in France for POKA, a Quebec-based connected worker platform, makes a simple case: between top-level systems (ERP, MES, CMMS) and the shop floor (paper, verbal handoffs, tribal knowledge), a layer is missing — the one that directly equips operators, the people who actually produce and fix things day to day.
The talk walks through POKA's platform components: AI-generated digital work instructions built from existing documents, real-time skills matrices, an AI assistant capable of translating into 39 languages and helping diagnose equipment faults, and a digital "huddle board" replacing the traditional morning production meeting. The speaker frames this within a broader French and European industrial competitiveness challenge, built around quality, flexibility, and capturing know-how ahead of the wave of retirements expected in coming years.
The session closes with a quantified client example (time savings on content creation, incident resolution, and new-operator onboarding) and POKA's roadmap toward AI agents.
