Functional Safety, AI Blindspots, and Designing Systems That Actually Work
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Explore PLCnext TechnologyIn this episode of the Unplugged: An IIoT Podcast, hosts Phil Seboa and Ed Fuentes sit down with Jason Watts, Owner and Founder of Alpha Industrial Technologies. Jason brings 25 years of hands-on Siemens automation and drives experience, a passion for functional safety, and a refreshingly practical take on AI, engineering culture, and turning agricultural waste into energy. This conversation is packed with lessons for integrators, plant engineers, and anyone building systems where the consequences of getting it wrong are measured in destroyed equipment, lost production, or worse.
Jason's path into industrial automation started at 14 years old, rebuilding Siemens drives alongside his father, who spent 38 years in coal mining as a system designer and controls engineer. That early exposure to heavy industry shaped everything about how Jason approaches engineering today. "You can't tune out a bad bearing," Jason says. "If you have a system that isn't mechanically loading that bearing properly, there's no amount of control system I can put in to change that."
After a decade working for Wesco Distribution as a Siemens specialist covering the southern United States, Jason launched Alpha Industrial Technologies in 2018. The company operates on an unconventional model: rather than hiring full-time staff, Alpha brings on experienced engineers for project work on their own schedules. "A lot of times the best work that engineers do are on the weekends and after hours because it's stuff that they're involved with that they have passions about," Jason explains. The approach lets Alpha tap into deep expertise while giving engineers the freedom to work on projects that match their skills and interests.
With customers increasingly asking about AI integration, Jason has a clear-eyed perspective on where it helps and where it creates problems. He uses AI as an adversary in his design process, not as a shortcut. "The way I have AI set up is to basically nitpick and second guess everything that I put in," he says. "If it says something, I'm not going to take it as a matter of fact. I'm going to say, prove it."
For Jason, the most valuable use of AI is stress-testing designs. When working on dryer systems involving thermodynamic equations outside his core expertise, he leans on AI to challenge his assumptions and identify potential failure modes. "I'll ask it, how is this system going to break? What can you see in the failure modes?" That adversarial relationship keeps the tool honest and keeps Jason in control of the engineering decisions.
But there is a growing tension with customers. Some see AI as a reason to expect faster timelines and lower costs. "Some customers are like, well you're using AI, so that means it shouldn't take you that long or it shouldn't cost as much," Jason notes. "No, we're still going through and not cutting these corners." The engineering fundamentals have not changed just because the tools got smarter.
One of the advantages of working across multiple industries is the ability to transfer proven solutions from one sector to another. Jason's experience spans coal mining, automotive manufacturing, steel mills, and agriculture, and he sees technology transfer as an underutilized strategy. "What works in a coal mine is going to be more than overkill anywhere else," he says. Mining equipment is designed to survive a roof collapse, so those engineering principles translate powerfully into less extreme environments.
A visit to the Mercedes-Benz manufacturing facility in Tuscaloosa was a turning point in Jason's thinking. Watching just-in-time logistics where door panels arrived off a truck with only five doors of buffer before installation, and seeing coordinated lines of 3,000-ton stamping presses, reframed his understanding of precision and consequence. "The cost of a mistake in one of those things is just astronomical," he reflects. "A little bit of timing off and you ruin a $200,000 die."
The broader lesson for integrators: don't design in isolation. Technology that is commonplace in one industry can be revolutionary in another, but only if engineers are willing to look beyond their own sector.
Jason is passionate about functional safety, and he is direct about the misconceptions he sees in the American market. "Improperly designed safety systems, when you don't really quite understand how things are supposed to be working, yeah, they are going to impact production," he says. "But the importance of safety is not just about production."
He illustrates the point with a harrowing story from a coal mine where he later worked. An overloaded skip of wet coal faulted at the top of a 2,000-foot shaft. The momentary jerk caused the metal ropes to slip on the bull wheels, and the skip fell the entire depth of the mine, causing an explosion that destroyed everything at the bottom and top. The mine shut down for six months at a cost of roughly $1,500 per minute of downtime. Fortunately, workers at the bottom were evacuated in time. That incident drove Jason's father to create an exhaustive, hundreds-item safety checklist for any future modifications to those hoists.
Jason is particularly critical of how Safe Torque Off (STO) is implemented across the industry. "I absolutely hate STO because the way it is implemented is usually less safe than if people would just leave it alone," he says. The issue is that STO removes torque from a motor, but if the hazard requires controlled stopping rather than a power cut, STO makes the situation worse. A hoist drops its load. A fan keeps spinning. "The function has to mitigate the risk. And only when you do a risk assessment can you actually say this function will mitigate this risk."
In the US, functional safety processes are not yet mandated top-down the way Europe's Machine Directive requires. But Jason argues the business case is clear: documented risk assessments and proper safety methodology protect companies from liability and, more importantly, protect people.
One of Alpha's most innovative projects involves converting poultry manure into renewable natural gas and fertilizer using bio digesters. With roughly 360 million egg-laying hens in the US producing about 12 million tons of manure annually, the scale of the opportunity is enormous. "If you can ever turn something that's normally a waste product into a profit stream, then that's what we need to be doing," Jason says.
The process works by feeding manure into bio digesters where microorganisms break it down, producing methane that can be used for on-site cogeneration, in the drying process, or sold onto the natural gas grid. California is buying renewable natural gas at premium rates compared to fossil fuel sources, creating a real revenue stream from what was previously a disposal cost.
Jason's personal mission is bringing this technology down to smaller operations. Current economics work well at scale with a million birds feeding a centralized digester, but Alpha is working to find the lower limit. Jason has prototyped systems using 55-gallon drums and is scaling up from there. The key challenge is keeping the microorganisms healthy, as they are sensitive to pH levels, temperature, and nutrient composition. "That's where automation comes back," Jason explains. His modular cell-based design uses lower-cost pH and temperature sensors networked through IIoT principles, allowing individual cells to balance each other when conditions shift.
Alpha even has a PhD in artificial intelligence on the team designing neural networks to optimize these biological systems, connecting sensor data across the process to enable the kind of holistic, organism-level plant management that Jason sees as the future.
For 2026 and beyond, Jason's focus is on properly formatting and presenting sensor data to machine learning systems. "I see the holy grail of a system as being that entire plant operating as one organism almost, with one neural network that's making all of these decisions," he says. The challenge is not collecting data; it is cleaning, formatting, and time-aligning it so neural networks can actually use it.
It is a vision inherited from his father, who at nearly 70 years old recently authored a series of six books on his accumulated engineering knowledge. Jason shares that same restless drive. When asked about retirement, he laughs: "The day I die, probably right after it, because I'm always going to be doing something."
Jason Watts is the Owner and Founder of Alpha Industrial Technologies, a Tuscaloosa, Alabama-based automation company specializing in Siemens drives and control systems. With 25 years of experience spanning coal mining, automotive manufacturing, and agricultural technology, Jason is known for his practical engineering approach, his advocacy for functional safety, and his popular YouTube channel and LinkedIn presence where he shares real-world automation insights.
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