This post was originally published by Indianapolis Business Journal. Click here to read the original article. Batuhan Ak, general manager of Yamaha Marine Precision Propellers Inc., says AI helped the company make sense of mountains of data so it could fix manufacturing problems that were leading to defective boat propellers. (IBJ photo/Chad Williams) It’s not much of a stretch to say that artificial intelligence helped Greenfield-based Yamaha Marine Precision Propellers Inc. escape financial disaster. A few years ago, when Yamaha found itself mired in a costly and complicated manufacturing problem it couldn’t solve — an unexpected spike in the defect rate of the boat propellers it produces — the company turned to AI to help uncover the solution. “We had a mission-critical need for the technology,” said Batuhan Ak, Yamaha Marine’s general manager. If not for AI, Ak said, [...]