For manufacturers

Your best machinist is 64.
What happens at 65?

Twenty years of how-we-do-it lives in a handful of people, and none of it is written down. Apex Replicant captures it before it walks out the door, and answers your team's questions in your expert's voice, 24/7.

The 30-Day Continuity Proof→Talk with a Digital Protégé→
  • 11,000+Americans turning 65 every day
  • 34USPTO patent claims on file
  • $40 an hourBilled by the minute, no per-seat license
  • Under 24 hrsFirst interview to live Protégé

Two people. Opposite problems. One fix.

Every shop floor has the same standoff, and it is not a technology problem.

  1. Your senior expert needs fewer interruptions

    They have run that lathe for twenty years and they are interrupted every twenty minutes. Their own backlog has not moved in years. An interruption does not cost one question. It costs them the rest of the day.

  2. Your new engineer needs more answers

    Three years in, competent, and blocked. Not by difficulty, by availability. Every time they ask the same question again it costs them a little standing, so eventually they stop asking and guess instead.

  3. A Digital Protégé serves both at once

    The junior gets the answer in minutes, in the expert's own voice and judgment. The expert stops being the help desk. This is the only intervention that gives both of them what they want at the same time.

"You have a handful of people who know how to make the complicated parts. When one of them is on vacation, or retired, you can talk to his Protégé instead of bothering him."

One hour of your expert's time to start.

The process begins with a one-hour AI-guided voice interview. Your expert talks; the system extracts. A working Protégé can be live in under 24 hours from the first interview.

From there it deepens. Upload the SOPs and the prints. Point it at your internal knowledge base and it reads that too. Every conversation it has is logged, summarized, and analyzed for weaknesses, and those corrections feed the next version.

Nothing about this requires prompt engineering, a data science team, or a year-long implementation. The documentation you already have stops being a graveyard and starts being an asset.

  1. Onboarding: the same four questions, answered on shift

    A new engineer asks the Protégé instead of the senior expert. It answers the questions that should never have needed a person: the same four questions, the forty-seventh onboarding. Your senior staff stop carrying that load in person.

  2. Continuity: the expert who is not there

    A print comes in with a question on it. The one person who knows the answer is on vacation, or gone. Their Protégé answers, and escalates to them only when it genuinely does not know.

  3. Focus: protecting your most valuable hours

    Your senior people stay on task instead of being pulled into the same four questions. The people who need their expertise still get it, usually within a few minutes, at any hour. No calendar required.

In a machine shop, a confident wrong answer is scrap.

This is the reason general-purpose AI has no business answering a question about your tolerances. A Protégé is built the other way around: it only knows what your expert knows, so it cannot invent an answer.

Four guardrails sit between a question and an answer:

  1. 1 and 2: context before answer

    The first two guardrails establish enough context about the question before anything is answered. Other AI systems are built to answer. This one is built to understand first.

  2. 3: your expert's knowledge first

    It goes to the expert's own validated knowledge base before anywhere else. If your expert has answered it, that is the answer you get, in their framing, not a generic one.

  3. 4: escalate, do not guess

    At the edge of what it knows, it escalates to the human rather than improvising.

"It only knows what you know. So it cannot invent an answer."

Built for the questions your IT lead will ask.

Your personal information is never used to train a public LLM. Personally identifiable information is removed from uploaded documents by default. Your expert's knowledge, the actual asset, is never used to train a public model.

Your knowledge base is isolated. When the contract ends, your data stays inside your organization.

SOC 2 Type II readiness is in progress, and the architecture was designed from the start for environments where a wrong answer carries real liability. 34 USPTO patent claims on file.

You pay for answers, not seats.

Pricing is usage-based: $40 per hour, billed by the minute, with volume discounts available at scale. There is no per-seat license, so giving access to the whole shop costs nothing until somebody actually uses it, which removes the usual argument about who gets a login.

You set your own thresholds and alerts, so usage stays visible and nothing runs away from you.

FAQ

Answers to what your team will ask.

Will my senior expert actually cooperate? They will think we are replacing them.
This is the most important question on the page, and it deserves a straight answer. They will think that, and no amount of messaging fixes an objection that has some truth in it. So do not lead with capturing their knowledge, lead with what they get: they stop being interrupted every twenty minutes. Credit the Protégé's answers to them by name, and show them how many people their expertise unblocked this month. What wins them over is hearing it answer correctly, in their own voice, without them in the room.
What happens when it does not know?
It hands the question to your expert instead of guessing. That is built in, and there is no setting that turns it off. The questions it hands off are useful on their own: they show you exactly what nobody has written down yet. It only ever speaks for the one person it was built from, so a question outside that person's trade gets the same honest answer.
Is this replacing our people?
No. It answers the questions that should never have needed a person: the same four questions, the forty-seventh onboarding. Your experts keep the work that requires judgment in the room, and get their focus back for it. When the Protégé hits its limits, it routes to the human.
How long does this take to stand up?
A working Protégé can be live in under 24 hours from the first interview. It does not need a year-long implementation, a data science team, or prompt engineering. It gets better from month two onward as it learns from real conversations.
We already wrote SOPs and nobody uses them.
That is normal, and it is an advantage here. Documentation fails because reading a binder is slower than asking a person. A Protégé makes the binder answer questions conversationally, which is what people actually wanted. It can also stay current automatically from a feed you specify, so it does not decay the way a document does.
Who gets access, and what does that cost us?
That is your call, and because pricing is usage-based rather than per-seat, breadth of access costs nothing on its own. Most manufacturers start with one expert and one team, prove the ramp-time saving, then widen.

Start with the one person
you cannot replace.

Thirty days, one expert, one hour of their time, and a measured before-and-after in your own numbers. $1,997, fixed, with nothing to sign afterwards.

Start the conversation→The 30-Day Continuity Proof→

Argue with one before you believe any of this.

Everything above is a claim. Two minutes on a microphone is evidence, and the part worth testing is not whether it answers well. It is what it does when it cannot.

Talk to Ray’s Protégé

Fair warning, and it is the point: Ray is a composite senior manufacturing engineer, twenty-four years on a shop floor. If you are in HR, or run a services firm, or own a family business, the shop talk will not be your world. It is an example, and we would rather tell you that up front.

What is your world is how it behaves, and that part is identical to what your own expert’s Protégé would do. Ask it the kind of thing you would normally interrupt a senior engineer to ask. You get Ray’s answer, in his words, with his name on it. When it does not know, it says so and pulls in the real person instead of guessing. That last part is built in, and there is no setting that turns it off.

Uses your microphone · about two minutes · no signup, no email

Start with the one person you cannot replace.

It takes about two minutes. Only one of these questions really matters, the one asking who you cannot afford to lose. If you can answer that in a sentence, this will probably work for you.

Hear one first

We will reply personally within one business day. No sequence, no drip, no demo request. If it is not a fit, we will say so and tell you why.