Fable
The screwdriver and the repairman
Old Peng's property company manages thirty buildings, and each building has ten valves requiring monthly inspection. He bought an automatic inspection cart equipped with a smart wrench. Each time Old Peng marks the points on a map, the cart drives over, and at the designated position the wrench extends, turns twice, checks pressure and sends data back.
After three months of operation, the results were good. But every month Old Peng had to spend half a day marking points on the cart's map — thirty buildings times ten valves, three hundred coordinates, entered by hand. A new technician asked: can't the cart find the valves by itself? Old Peng said: no, it only goes where I mark.
Old Peng later upgraded the system, adding a visual recognition module and a decision unit to the cart. Now the cart no longer needed manual marking. It drove into a building, scanned the environment, identified the pipeline route, found the valve position, turned it itself, judged the likely position of the next valve, and planned its own route.
In the first week after the upgraded system went live, something happened: the cart found a leaking valve in an old building, not on the inspection list. The old system would have skipped it directly. The new system's decision unit judged that this leak could affect the water pressure of the entire floor, and proactively stopped to take photos and send an alert.
A salesperson from an equipment supplier came to visit and said: Your two generations of products can both be called "automatic inspection systems" externally. Old Peng said: The same name externally, but two different things internally. The first generation is a moving wrench plus a remote control—a tool. The second generation is an inspector that can see, judge, and plan routes.
The property company later took on a contract for an industrial park, and the client required the inspection system's capabilities to be clearly stated in the bid. Old Peng had the technicians list them in two columns: the left column for "tool capabilities"—can turn valves, can read pressure gauges, can take photos. The right column for "autonomous inspection capabilities"—can recognize pipes, can plan routes, can discover unregistered anomalies, can make autonomous decisions when information is incomplete.
The client read the proposal and said: many people mix these two columns together, and we cannot tell which company truly has autonomous inspection capability and which is just a remote-controlled tool. If you write them separately, we can tell at a glance.
After signing the contract, Old Peng sent a message to the team: from now on, when introducing a product, first ask yourself—does this thing make its own decisions, or does it wait to be used? The answer changes both the price you charge and the responsibility you bear.