By the age of eight, Conor Temple was already showing an interest in engineering. His grandfather had taught him how to use tools, and on one occasion his mother came home to find that he had cut his bike in half to make a pedal-powered paddlewheel boat. <\/p>\n
Temple went on to study mechanical engineering at university and worked in hands-on engineering roles before moving into automation equipment sales. <\/p>\n
It was there he spotted the gap in the market for his Athlone-based start-up, Rheba Intelligence Systems. <\/p>\n
While he was training two project managers on a \u20ac200,000 machine, he saw how difficult it was to quickly diagnose faults. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe machine was six weeks late being commissioned and they were under serious pressure. Then a fault flashed up on the screen, and both of them looked at me for an answer,\u201d says Temple. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe answer to the problem was in the manual but the manual had several thousand pages, so I tried ChatGPT<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cThe answer came back instantly and looked completely plausible. But something felt off. <\/p>\n \u201cI went through the manual and found the \u2018real\u2019 answer. I made an adjustment and in two minutes the machine was running. <\/p>\n \u201cLater, I looked at the ChatGPT answer properly. Had I followed its advice, it would have destroyed a component with a six-week lead time and a \u20ac30,000 price tag.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe answer wasn\u2019t wrong in an obvious way,\u201d Temple says. <\/p>\n \u201cIt was wrong in a confident, well-presented, entirely believable way. That\u2019s the specific kind of \u2018wrong\u2019 that gets expensive equipment damaged and careers shortened.\u201d <\/p>\n Temple\u2019s has built Rheba to solve that problem. The company is aiming to transform industrial maintenance by providing engineers with a fast, accurate way to get the information they need to solve machinery glitches. <\/p>\n Rheba takes a company\u2019s suite of manuals and centralises them with a comprehensive indexing feature that finds all the related information quickly. <\/p>\n \u201cIn a typical company there are manuals for everything but they\u2019re on USB sticks, in folders, in files and on desktops and no one knows exactly where everything is,\u201d says Temple, who adds that with 20 per cent of the engineering workforce due to retire within the next five years, a lot of what they intuitively \u2018know\u2019 about where to find things will be lost. <\/p>\n