Weave Solutions joined as a sponsor of the 21st PIIE National Congress, held alongside the 12th IE Research Conference and the 4th AI Summit & CEO Forum on October 8–9, 2026, at the Makati Diamond Residences in Makati City. Organized by the Philippine Institute of Industrial Engineers (PIIE), the event carried the theme “Adoption and Scaling Digital Transformation Across the Enterprise to Unlock Operational Excellence” and brought together CEOs, industry leaders, and academic institutions from across the country. It was also a good opportunity to reconnect with many of our own clients, who were in the room as fellow attendees.
The Congress landed at a moment when many industries are genuinely uneasy about what AI means for their workforce. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 39% of workers’ core skills will be transformed or become outdated by 2030, and a joint ILO–NASK study from May 2025 found that one in four jobs globally are at risk of being reshaped by generative AI. That unease was part of the backdrop for the day’s conversations, and it shaped how several speakers framed the path forward.
AI has to be experienced, not just discussed
In his welcome remarks, Congress Chairman Engr. Edgardo V. Carasig set the tone for the two days: the conversation needs to move from asking whether to adopt AI to asking where it will be adopted next. He positioned PIIE’s role as connecting academe, industry, and the wider technology ecosystem, so universities understand where AI is heading and can prepare students for the jobs that follow. His point, repeated through the day: AI needs to be experienced, not just discussed. The Congress’s job isn’t to talk about the future. It’s to start building it.
Digital transformation is a people problem before it’s a technology one
PIIE President Engr. Jerry A. Lim picked up the same thread in his message. Digital transformation, he said, isn’t just technology – it’s the people and the courage to transform. He framed the Congress’s ambition plainly: turn ideas into action, partnerships into possibilities, and those possibilities into lasting impact, building what he called the digital backbone of Luzon’s next economy. For Lim, the measure of success isn’t the technology adopted, but the value it creates for people locally, including solving the country’s supply chain bottlenecks.
Predictive maintenance only pays off under the right conditions
One of the day’s more concrete sessions came from Luis “Chito” A. Jacinto, President of the Information Security Officers Group, on using data and AI for predictive maintenance. His core argument: shifting from calendar-based maintenance schedules to real-time equipment health data reduces downtime, extends asset lifespan, and improves workforce safety by catching problems before they cause failures. He framed this as conditional rather than universal. AI-driven predictive maintenance is worth the investment when an operation has measurable failure patterns, a high cost of downtime, safety and compliance exposure, and enough measurable digital footprint to work from. Without those four conditions, the case is weaker.
Where Weave fits into this conversation
For PIIE’s audience of industrial engineers, the clearest connection is OTRS10, the productivity and time-and-motion platform we distribute. It gives operations teams the kind of measurable, floor-level data that Jacinto’s predictive-maintenance framework depends on: tracking actual cycle times against standard, surfacing where time is lost between value-adding steps, and giving leaders a factual basis for where to invest next instead of relying on estimates or gut feel.
Several of our clients were in the room for these sessions, and the conversations afterward were less about whether to adopt AI and more about how a platform like OTRS10 can make their own teams more efficient – spotting bottlenecks, cutting waste, and getting more out of the resources they already have.
If your organization is looking at how OTRS10 could support your own operations, talk to our team.
