Expert Scale™ · For Manufacturers

Your best machinist is 64.
What happens at 65?

Twenty years of how-we-do-it lives in a handful of people, and none of it is written down. Expert Scale captures it before it walks out the door — and answers your team's questions in your expert's voice, 24/7.

Drew Harris CEO & Co-Founder info@expertscale.ai
Alan Kadish Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer info@expertscale.ai
10,000Americans retiring every day
6%Of questions need the human expert
6→1Months to onboard, at one firm
<24 hrsFirst interview to live Protégé

Two people. Opposite problems. One fix.

Every shop floor has the same standoff, and it is not a technology problem.

Your senior expert needs fewer interruptions

He has run that lathe for twenty years and he is interrupted every twenty minutes. His own backlog has not moved in years. Every interruption does not cost a question — it costs him the rest of the day getting his head back into his own work.

Your new engineer needs more answers

Three years in, competent, and blocked — not by difficulty, by availability. Every time he asks the same question again it costs him a little standing, so eventually he stops asking and guesses instead.

A Digital Protégé serves both at once

The junior gets the answer in minutes, in the expert's own voice and judgment. The expert stops being the help desk. This is the only intervention that gives both of them what they want at the same time.

"You have a handful of people who know how to make the complicated parts. When one of them is on vacation — or retired — you can talk to his Protégé instead of bothering him."

One hour of your expert's time to start.

The process begins with a one-hour AI-guided voice interview. Your expert talks; the system extracts. From that single hour it can answer about half of what your expert would — useful on day one, from one hour of the one person you can least afford to tie up.

From there it deepens. Upload the SOPs, the prints, the tribal documentation that has been sitting in the graveyard since somebody wrote it years ago. Point it at an internal knowledge base and it reads that too. Every conversation it has is logged, summarized, and analyzed for weaknesses, and those corrections feed the next version. After a few months of real use it handles about nine questions in ten.

Nothing about this requires prompt engineering, a data science team, or a year-long implementation. The documentation you already have stops being a graveyard and starts being an asset.

Onboarding
Six months to one month
An engineering firm reported cutting the ramp time for new engineers from six months to one, with Digital Protégés carrying the load their senior staff used to carry in person.
Reported by one firm
Continuity
The expert who is not there
A print comes in with a question on it. The one person who knows the answer is on vacation, or gone. His Protégé answers — and escalates to him only when it genuinely does not know.
6% escalation rate
Focus
Protecting your most valuable hours
Your senior people stay on task instead of being pulled into the same four questions. The people who need their expertise still get it — usually within a few minutes, at any hour.
No calendar required

In a machine shop, a confident wrong answer is scrap.

This is the reason general-purpose AI has no business answering a question about your tolerances. A Protégé is built the other way around: it only knows what your expert knows, so it cannot make things up.

Four guardrails sit between a question and an answer:

1 & 2 — Context before answer

The first two guardrails establish enough context about the question before anything is answered. Other AI systems are optimized to answer. This one is optimized to understand first.

3 — Your expert's knowledge first

It goes to the expert's own validated knowledge base before anywhere else. If your expert has answered it, that is the answer you get — in his framing, not a generic one.

4 — Escalate, do not guess

At the edge of what it knows, it escalates to the human rather than improvising. In practice only about 6% of questions ever reach that point.

"It only knows what you know. So it can't make things up."

Built for the questions your IT lead will ask.

Your personal information is never used to train a public LLM. Personally identifiable information is removed from uploaded documents by default. Your expert's knowledge — the actual asset — is never used to train a public model.

Your knowledge base can stay on your infrastructure. For organizations with data-sovereignty requirements, documentation can remain on-premise, with Expert Scale connecting by secure API. When the contract ends, your data stays inside your organization.

SOC 2 Type II certification is in progress, and the architecture was designed from the start for environments where a wrong answer carries real liability. The underlying approach is covered by a pending patent: 34 claims across 9 core innovations.

You pay for answers, not seats.

Pricing is usage-based: $40 per hour, billed by the minute, with volume discounts available at scale. There is no per-seat license, so giving access to the whole shop costs nothing until somebody actually uses it — which removes the usual argument about who gets a login.

You set your own thresholds and alerts, so usage stays visible and nothing runs away from you.

Answers to what your team will ask.

Will my senior guy actually cooperate? He will think we are replacing him.
This is the most important question on the page, and it deserves a straight answer. He will think that, and no amount of messaging fixes an objection that has some truth in it. So do not lead with capturing his knowledge — lead with what he gets: he stops being interrupted every twenty minutes. Credit the Protégé's answers to him by name, and show him how many people his expertise unblocked this month. In our experience the people most protective of their craft become the most engaged once they see it answering in their own voice, correctly, without them in the room.
What happens when it does not know?
It hands the question to your expert instead of guessing. That is built in, and there is no setting that turns it off. About 6% of questions reach that point, and those 6% are useful on their own: they show you exactly what nobody has written down yet. It only ever speaks for the one person it was built from, so a question outside that person's trade gets the same honest answer.
Is this replacing our people?
No. It answers the questions that should never have needed a person — the same four questions, the forty-seventh onboarding. Your experts keep the work that requires judgment in the room, and get their focus back for it. When the Protégé hits its limits, it routes to the human.
How long does this take to stand up?
A working Protégé can be live in under 24 hours from the first interview. It does not need a year-long implementation, a data science team, or prompt engineering. It gets better from month two onward as it learns from real conversations.
We already wrote SOPs and nobody uses them.
That is normal, and it is an advantage here. Documentation fails because reading a binder is slower than asking a person. A Protégé makes the binder answer questions conversationally, which is what people actually wanted. It can also stay current automatically from a feed you specify, so it does not decay the way a document does.
Who gets access — and what does that cost us?
That is your call, and because pricing is usage-based rather than per-seat, breadth of access costs nothing on its own. Most manufacturers start with one expert and one team, prove the ramp-time saving, then widen.

Argue with one before you believe any of this.

Everything above is a claim. Two minutes on a microphone is evidence, and the part worth testing is not whether it answers well — it is what it does when it cannot.

Talk to Ray's Protégé

Ray is a composite senior manufacturing engineer — twenty-four years on a shop floor, built the way your own expert's Protégé would be built. Ask him about setup reduction, about a chatter problem, about why the third shift scraps more than the first.

You will get a straight answer with his reasoning behind it. Push past what he knows and he will say so, then hand the question to a person. That is built in, and it is the one thing you cannot fake in a demo video.

Uses your microphone · about two minutes · no signup, no email

Start with the one person you cannot replace.

It takes about two minutes. Only one of these questions really matters — the one asking who you cannot afford to lose. If you can answer that in a sentence, this will probably work for you.

Hear one first

We will reply personally within one business day. No sequence, no drip, no demo request — if it is not a fit we will tell you that instead, and say why.

Start with the one person you cannot replace.
Thirty days, one expert, one hour of their time, and a measured before-and-after in your own numbers — $1,997, fixed, with nothing to sign afterwards. If you would rather hear one first, there is a working Protégé further up this page.
The 30-Day Continuity Proof Talk to a Protégé Email us