John Harrington of HighByte: Stop Making Data Swamps, Start Shipping Chocolate

We talk with John Harrington, co-founder of HighByte, about why factory-floor data stays invisible to the teams who need it most and how Industrial DataOps closes that gap. We explore contextualized data pipelines, the post-IoT architecture shift toward cloud data platforms, and why AI agents will force a new level of data quality and governance.  • Moving beyond “throw it over the wall” design and giving engineers real manufacturing feedback loops  • Defining Industrial DataOps and why context makes raw OT data usable  • Handling messy realities across MES, ERP, historians, inspection systems, files, and streaming telemetry  • Avoiding data swamps by standardizing, governing, and observing data pipelines at scale  • Using no-code tooling to build and maintain pipelines without relying on programmers  • Filtering and sampling data based on use case, frequency needs, and event triggers  • Preparing for AI agents as massive new consumers of shop floor data  • Realistic talk on AI and jobs, focusing on better work through better signal detection