The Tech Between Us Episode 3

Raymond Yin:
How will the relationship between engineers and AI evolve? In this episode exclusively for subscribers, Nemanja Jokanovic, Head of Sales at SnapMagic, provides his take on the future of design tools.

In fact, we were - we Mouser - we were having conversations with other companies, and they were describing what they were doing with some of their AI enablement and whatnot. It just kept coming back to me thinking, no, the engineer still has to be involved. The engineer still has to do their job.
Nemanja Jokanovic:
Yeah!

Raymond Yin:
It sounds like you guys absolutely recognize that.
Nemanja Jokanovic:
I'm a big fan of AI. I use it. I love it. It helps me. It's just naturally becoming a part of our society, regardless of the industry we're talking about. But we all know AI needs to be trained in the simplest form of just using ChatGPT today. It makes mistakes. It makes a lot of mistakes. It's proven. You've seen it. I've seen it. And going back to what we discussed earlier, at least in our particular instance, in SnapMagic, you have to use it with MAT, you have to use it with an approved manufacturer reference designs. You have to work it with partners and then train the model. And for that to happen, Raymond, you have to have people involved. You have to have the engineers communicate. You have to have organization. Somebody needs to begin with, create that reference designs. And the reference design itself is going to become an automated process as a part of AI, but it's going to have to be verified, and it's going to have to be trained, and you just have to have people continue to steer the ship.

Raymond Yin:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Nemanja Jokanovic:
We've had those conversations with social media. When social media came out, and then self-checkout kiosks, and I guess there's still cashiers in grocery stores. I go to my HEB, and I still see people out there checking out, and we had self-checkout for years and years.

Raymond Yin:
I remember one of the goals was you fill up your cart and you pass it under an RFID arch, and it scans everything in your cart, and you get the bill, and you never have to interact with anybody or go through a barcode scanner. Not quite there yet, but yeah, but there's still people there checking out.
Nemanja Jokanovic:
Exactly.

Raymond Yin:
So, one thing you mentioned earlier that was interesting, and thinking back on it, it's absolutely true. A lot of the innovation like the cloud and artificial intelligence has been within that last five-year time period of these, the major tool chains. So, I'm going to ask you to get out your crystal ball. Where do you see a lot of this going in 10 years from today?
Nemanja Jokanovic:
Crystal ball? I think the prediction of AI - we are going to see electronics become smarter and evolve. I would say not 10 years for sure, but maybe even five years with the sophistication we have, that system level electronics are going to be designed a lot more efficiently using the processes we just described. Just getting the products to market is going to be a lot faster. You're not going to have disconnected subsystems requiring a lot of manual work to become connected systems and applicable in any industry really. But in short, where I really see us going in the next couple of years is from this ideation of maximizing the efficiency to develop system level electronics, which we're still trying to figure out through specific applications of AI within each stage. I think just the process is going to become a lot smoother because the AI and the language is going to be a lot more trained and new technologies will emerge, and as the result, you're going to start seeing better development or just really efficient development of system level electronics.

Raymond Yin:
So rather than you were saying, rather than doing it piecemeal, basically products are going to design be designed in one continuous flow.
Nemanja Jokanovic:
Yeah. Faster.

Raymond Yin:
Which is obviously the name of the game when it comes to artificial intelligence. You want to make it more efficient. So Nemanja, how can companies take the most or make the most advantage of all these changes in the design process? I mean between cloud and moving things to the cloud and AI enablement, what should companies be doing to be able to best take advantage of that? Companies and engineers?
Nemanja Jokanovic:
It really comes down to understanding what the problem or the challenge each organization is facing. And I'm not going to say what everybody should be doing, but I will tell you what companies have been doing and some of them done it successfully. I want to just use a simple example of the PC industry and the chips themselves. You're looking at companies like NVIDIA and companies like AMD and Qualcomm now empowering every laptop, every Dell laptop or HP laptop you get or Lenovo you get is really coming with AI enabled applications. So, what I think companies will do naturally is require, I believe that people actually require their employees to understand both benefits and some not so good things about AI = and things that the AI can improve upon. I think where we're going to start seeing every organization coming as a set of requirements is going to be the employees will have to - engineers or anybody - as a matter of fact, having to understand the capabilities of AI and at that point decide, is that applicable for their organization or how they're going to use it. I was just reading an interview with the CEO of Uber. One of the things he mentioned is we lack - one of the most advanced AI companies out there - we as employees, all of us lack the core knowledge of the competency of AI and what it can do.

Raymond Yin:
Oh, interesting.
Nemanja Jokanovic:
And that needing to be one of the key points they're going to invest a lot of resources on is just training people and educating people on the capability of AI from hardware development, from electronic development to software development and how those things are going to be applied within their company. 

Raymond Yin:
Okay, interesting,
Nemanja Jokanovic:
It's no secret of AI being present. The laptop I have and use to communicate with you comes an integrated AI capability. I can ask it whatever I want. Is it going to be accurate? Most of the time.

Raymond Yin:
Yeah. Good enough. Yeah. I know a lot of our manufacturer partners are, moving their marketing and their focus to AI enablement regardless of what particular product category they're in.
Nemanja Jokanovic:
Exactly. Do you remember the little self-driving vacuum, right?

Raymond Yin:
Oh, the little Roomba. Yeah,
Nemanja Jokanovic:
The Roomba you have in your kitchen. I remember looking at the original design of that, which was at the time done in our software, the company I used to work at. And it was just interesting how some of these things are going through the evolution and application of just AI software from its original version one to today where you can programmatically tell it what to do. And it will actually tell you why it's doing certain things and based on the previous things that it has done or a missed room or a missed corner or how it can fix itself. And it can really be applied to something as simple - in a commercial standpoint - of a home application to security, to home automation, to develop automotive and aerospace applications.

Raymond Yin:
Right. yeah, it has touched everything, and it will continue to touch everything.
Nemanja Jokanovic:
Exactly.

Raymond Yin:
Well, Nemanja, I really appreciate all your time and your expertise. I mean, yeah, it's actually been really fun having you on this podcast. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Nemanja Jokanovic:
I'm so grateful, Raymond, thank you for having me. I'm very excited to just see where we are headed, help impact the industry through some of the things that we work on. This is the best time and the most exciting time to be a part of our industry. So, I hope I'm right where it's going to take us in the next five to 10 years.

Raymond Yin:
Thank you for listening to our subscriber exclusive episode. We hope you'll explore more of Mouser's Empowering Innovation Together content. Stay tuned as Mouser explores more technologies throughout the year by visiting mouser.com/empowering-innovation.