During a Tuesday presentation (“Complete Observability: The End of Inspection”) Thomas Hayden, chief technology officer at Engineering Director, Inc., said that “a system is referred to as ‘highly observable’ when no further instrumentation or telemetry is needed to determine the state of the system.”

Inherent in that statement is that regardless of whatever tools are used to measure an asset’s condition, it will be a human who will determine the overall results of an inspection. It is probably for that very reason that inspections are subject to error: humans make mistakes; humans get sick, retire, change careers, etc.; and inspections are limited by time and money.

During his presentation at the AMPP Annual Conference + Expo 2025, Hayden shared a statement allegedly created by IBM in 1979: “A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.” That was then.

But now, nearly 50 years after IBM attempted to placate those with fears of computers, rapid improvements are being made in machine learning, mobile connectivity, digital twins, and more. With that in mind, Hayden made the point that traditional inspection may become a relic of the past.

This transition is already underway in asset-heavy but wired industries, such as data centers or mobile device management. A safe transition requires working with the concept of “observability” and the theoretical implications of replacing inline inspection with a completely observable digital system.

What the industry needs to do is develop a formal framework and verifiable mechanisms to establish accountability for critical integrity management decisions—e.g., “repair/don’t repair,” “re-inspect now/later,” “adjust operating pressure”—when such decisions are made or directly driven by autonomous artificial intelligence/machine learning systems.

“It’s a solvable problem,” Hayden said in his remarks from Nashville.

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