Beyond the Hype: AI for Today—and What It Might Do Tomorrow by W. Frazier Pruitt

ASQ Synergy for Success virtual conference, Tuesday, July 22, 2025, Digital Transformation Session track. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere—on your newsfeed, in your tools, and probably in more vendor sales pitches than you’d like. But how useful is it really for quality professionals? Spoiler alert: it’s not replacing you anytime soon. But it might just become a surprisingly helpful productivity partner. “Beyond the Hype: AI for Today—and What It Might Do Tomorrow” takes a clear-eyed look at where AI succeeds, where it fails, and how we can use it more wisely in quality work. We’ll explore a set of real QMS use cases—from document control to audits to training—and evaluate what AI does well, where it struggles, and what that tells us about its current (and possible future) role in quality. We’ll avoid the extremes: this session isn’t about embedding AI into your ERP/MRP system or uploading your entire document repository to a chatbot. But it also won’t stay theoretical. We’ll try out a few small, practical examples together—tools you can use today in your actual work. Along the way, you’ll gain a better feel for how to evaluate AI’s strengths and weaknesses with more nuance. We won’t become AI super-users in one session—but you might leave thinking more critically about how (and where) AI can genuinely help. You might even walk away with a new AI trick or two. This session is for anyone curious, skeptical, or just trying to make sense of what AI means for their day-to-day work in quality.