Paper nobody can search
Thousands of pages of manuals, SOPs and fault tables — none of it searchable on the floor when something breaks.
Private · on-site · cited
My data doesn't leave the box, and yours doesn't leave the building.
The plant-floor expert that never retires — and never phones home. Midnight Industrial A.I. (MIAI) reads your manuals, SOPs and equipment documents and answers your maintenance techs in plain English — in real time, cited to the exact page. It runs on a managed appliance inside your building, included in the lease. No cloud. No per-seat fees. Nothing leaves your network.
I take yours as serious as mine.
The problem
The answer exists. It's just buried in 6,000 pages at 2 a.m.
Maintenance runs on documents nobody can find when a line is down — and on knowledge that walks out the door when senior techs retire.
Knowledge walking out the door
Experienced techs retire faster than they're replaced, and their hard-won fixes leave with them.
Cloud AI is blocked
Corporate privacy policy won't let operational data leave the building. Most plants simply can't use cloud tools.
How it works
Your documents in. Cited answers out. On your network.
01 · ingest
We ingest your library. Your manuals, SOPs, equipment docs and troubleshooting procedures are loaded onto the on-site appliance — in-house, never uploaded anywhere.
02 · ask
Techs ask in plain English. From a tablet or their phone on your LAN: a fault code, a parameter, a procedure. No query syntax to learn.
03 · cite
MIAI answers with citations. A 32-billion-parameter model answers in seconds and cites the exact document and page — so the tech can verify on paper.
04 · improve
Your shop gets smarter. Techs pin notes to pages — gotchas, known issues, fixes. Institutional knowledge is captured instead of lost.
What it does
Built for the floor, not the demo
Trust · cited to the page
Every answer points to the document and page it came from. MIAI never asks a tech to just trust it — it shows the receipt.
Verify · reference pane & straightedge
Tap a citation to open the cited page in-app, with the relevant section highlighted. A digital straightedge helps read dense PT charts and tables off the paper.
Honesty · won't guess
On dense numeric charts it hands the tech the chart and the tool instead of risking a misread — a wrong PT value is an incident, not a typo.
Knowledge · tech notes
Your techs pin shop knowledge to specific pages. Every unit gets smarter the day your senior people start writing them down.
Liability · safety guard
OSHA-program-gated questions (arc flash, lockout/tagout, respirators, lifts) are refused in software and referred to your safety program — by name. It points to your program; it never stands in as one.
Field-ready · phones, tablets, gloves
Big-text mode, day and midnight themes, tap targets sized for gloved hands. Works on the phone already in the tech's pocket.
Why it matters to the business
Less downtime. Knowledge that stays. Risk you can point to.
Faster fixes
Techs find the right procedure in seconds instead of hunting binders — where it matters most, on the floor mid-breakdown.
Knowledge retention
Senior-tech know-how is captured as notes pinned to the docs, instead of retiring with them.
Privacy & compliance
Operational data never leaves the building — no cloud privacy review, no IT-department friction to clear.
No cloud bill
The on-site appliance is part of your lease — we provide and maintain it. No per-seat SaaS fees, no metered tokens, no surprise cloud renewals.
Liability posture
A deterministic safety guard and advisory-only outputs keep the system in its lane and pointed at your programs.
Verified reads, not guesses
Photograph a nameplate and two readers that fail differently transcribe it — disagreement gets flagged for a person, never guessed. Our published test caught a bearing number that two AIs and a human all misread under glare. On a floor, a misread rating isn't a typo — so transcription is never authorization: a qualified person confirms every number a procedure relies on, and the check is logged.
Works when the internet doesn't
Air-gapped operation. A WAN outage doesn't take your reference library down with it.
The non-negotiable
Built with cloud. Run without it.
We use the cloud to build MIAI. We never use it to run it. Once deployed, your documents and every query stay 100% on the on-site appliance, on your network — by design, not by setting. A hybrid-cloud fallback would defeat the entire point, so there isn't one.
What gets deployed
A quiet appliance, not a data center
A small, sealed appliance runs the model on-site — we deploy, maintain and update it as part of the lease. Your techs reach it from tablets or phones over the LAN; nobody has to babysit a server.
35B-class
Model — MoE, local
~1–2 s
To a cited answer
24 GB
Intel Arc Pro B60
LAN-only, air-gap capable · Clients: tablets & phones · Corpus: multi-trade — electrical, mechanical, HVAC
What it costs
Priced like a tool, not a subscription tax
Straightforward per-box model. Final numbers come out of a short scoping conversation about your document library and how many techs.
One-time onboarding
Deployment & setup. We ingest your document library, deploy and configure the on-site appliance, and train your team. One-time, per facility.
Monthly lease
The appliance, included. The on-site appliance, model and software updates, document ingestion, and ongoing support — one monthly (or annual) lease per box, unlimited seats. Expands by additional per-department boxes, document sets, and sites.
It tends to pay for itself against the downtime of a single major breakdown. Ask about a pilot →
Who builds it
Built by a lifelong industrial tradesman, not a software vendor
ThirdShift R&D is a Portland, Oregon applied-AI company founded by a lifelong industrial tradesman with deep roots in Pacific Northwest manufacturing. MIAI was designed alongside maintenance techs, for the plant floor — by someone who has wired the panel and read the manual at 2 a.m., not someone selling software from the outside.
The mascot
Meet Marlow
MIAI's loading mechanic — a marmot in a hard hat who digs through the manuals while your answer comes up. He's the face on the loading screen, so the wait always has someone working it.
Marlow rides along with MIAI; Boone on CampOS keeps the small-business side.
Pilot program
Piloting with select partners
MIAI proves itself on real floors before it sells itself anywhere. We run a small number of pilots at a time — on your own hardware, in your own building — and intake opens as slots do. Tell us your trades and roughly how many documents and technicians, and you're in line when the next slot opens.
- ▸A pilot on your floor, with your manuals
- ▸Runs fully air-gapped — pull the cable, it still answers
- ▸Advisory-only — your techs and programs stay in charge
MIAI is advisory only. Qualified personnel must verify every answer against the equipment and your LOTO and safety procedures.