SAYAS South African Young Academy of Science
AI Workshop Series · Webinar · Wednesday 30 September 2026 · Online

How to deploy AI models you can trust.

Lessons from the bottling industry. Leen Remmelzwaal, founder of FirstStep.ai, on the engineering it takes to move an AI model from a promising prototype to a production line that inspects millions of products a day.

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30 SepWednesday, 2026
13:00to 14:00 SAST
OnlineMicrosoft Teams
SAYAShosted by ASSAf
Artwork for the webinar: a networked globe, a robotic hand and a pair of scales, in green
The South African Young Academy of Science, hosted by the Academy of Science of South Africa, invites you to a webinar.

About the talk

Accurate is not the same as trustworthy.

The first session of the academy’s 2026 AI Workshop Series: a real quality-control project at an international bottling company, and the techniques used to make its AI reliable enough for production.

Artificial intelligence is transforming industry, from computer vision systems that inspect products on production lines to large language model agents that assist engineers with everyday tasks.

These technologies are powerful, but they introduce a new engineering challenge: AI models are non-deterministic. Ask the same question twice, or show the same image twice, and the model may produce different answers. Traditional engineering follows the scientific method, where repeating the same experiment under the same conditions should produce the same result. That repeatability is what gives engineers confidence that a system is reliable. AI challenges the assumption.

In this talk Leen presents a real-world quality-control project at an international bottling company, where AI automatically inspects products on a high-speed production line. He explains the engineering techniques used to measure, test and improve the reliability of the AI system until it met the standards required for production use.

The session will show that successful industrial AI is not just about building an accurate model, but about engineering a complete system that people can trust.

Facilitated by Dr Yaseera IsmailFacilitated by Dr Ekaterina Rzyankina
Hosted by South African Young Academy of Science · Academy of Science of South Africa · Department of Science, Technology and Innovation

The speaker

From prototype to production line.

Leen works at the point where research meets a factory floor, where a model has to be right, every shift, at line speed.

Leen Remmelzwaal

Leen Remmelzwaal

Founder of FirstStep.ai · Technical consultant on applied AI

Leen is the founder of FirstStep.ai and a technical consultant to a range of companies across South Africa, helping organisations design and deploy practical artificial intelligence solutions. With over 15 years of experience in software engineering and AI, he specialises in transforming research prototypes into reliable systems that operate continuously in real-world industrial environments.

He completed his MSc in Engineering at the University of Cape Town and is currently completing his PhD, with research focusing on artificial intelligence and brain-inspired computing. He has published in artificial intelligence, computer vision and autonomous systems, with recent work on explainable AI for wildfire detection and trustworthy AI systems.

His work includes AI-powered quality inspection systems that inspect millions of products each day in industrial manufacturing, edge AI systems for early wildfire detection and, more recently, on-premise large language models and AI assistants for enterprise use. He is passionate about helping engineers understand how AI can be deployed safely, reliably and responsibly, bridging the gap between academic research and practical engineering.

Wednesday 30 September, 13:00 SAST

One hour, online, for anyone putting AI into the real world.

Engineers, researchers, students and decision-makers are all welcome. Registration is on Microsoft Teams.

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