Eighty years of operations, and where we came in.

1943 · Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts

A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity, the first mathematical model of a neural network.

1958 · Frank Rosenblatt

The Perceptron, a machine that learns from examples instead of instructions.

1961 · Unimate at General Motors

The first industrial robot goes to work on a production line.

1968 · Dick Morley and Bedford Associates

The Modicon 084, the first programmable logic controller. Most plants still run its descendants.

1975 · Joseph Orlicky

Material Requirements Planning. The idea that a plant can be planned from its data.

1979 · SAP

R/2 puts the whole enterprise on one system, and starts the era of data that never reaches the floor.

1980 · OSIsoft

The plant historian. Operations begin keeping their own record of what actually happened.

1986 · David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton, Ronald Williams

Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors. Neural networks become trainable.

1988 · Taiichi Ohno

Toyota Production System reaches English readers. Continuous improvement becomes an operating standard.

1990s · Tracy Gromniski · mode40

A teenager on a 150-cow dairy in La Broquerie, Manitoba builds her family farm's first production tracking system because paper was losing the answers.

1992 · SAP

R/3 moves the enterprise to client-server, and the gap between the office system and the plant floor widens.

1997 · Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber

Long Short-Term Memory. Machines learn to remember sequences, which is what every process is.

1999 · Kevin Ashton

Coins the phrase Internet of Things while trying to get supply chain data out of a warehouse.

1999 · Cameron Bergen · mode40

Joins one of Canada's largest primary food processors and starts moving from the field into operational leadership.

2000 · ISA

ISA-95 gives the floor and the business a shared language. Almost nobody implements it fully.

2006 · Amazon

EC2 and S3. Compute stops being a capital project.

2007 · Cameron Bergen and Tracy Gromniski · mode40

Both inside the same billion-dollar food business, one on the operations side and one building applications.

2010 · The mode40 founding team

First machine learning models put into production inside a working food operation. Twelve years before ChatGPT.

2011 · Hannover Messe

Industrie 4.0 is named. The industry gets a label for a problem it has had since 1979.

2012 · Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton

AlexNet wins ImageNet and settles the argument about deep learning.

2014 · The mode40 founding team

The platform gets built in-house, beside the real job. It isn't enough, and that lesson is why we left.

2016 · DeepMind

AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol. Machines start solving problems nobody wrote rules for.

2017 · Vaswani et al.

Attention Is All You Need. The transformer arrives, and every model after it is downstream of this paper.

2018 · US FDA

Clears IDx-DR, the first autonomous AI diagnostic. Healthcare gets a regulated answer to whether a model can decide.

2018 · The food business the founders worked in · mode40

Acquired for over a billion dollars, after more than $300M in documented annual operational savings.

2020 · DeepMind

AlphaFold 2 solves protein structure prediction, and research timelines compress by decades.

2020 · mode40

Founded in a basement in Steinbach, Manitoba. A laptop and a conviction that the gap was not going to close by itself.

2021 · Anthropic

Founded. Frontier model research splits into more than one house.

2022 · OpenAI

ChatGPT. The public meets what the research world had been building since 1943.

2023 · mode40

The Singularity ships as one platform.

2024 · The industry

Agents arrive. Software stops answering questions and starts doing the work.

2026 · mode40 customers

One runs 19 facilities on a single installation. 86% downtime reduction across seven production facilities.