Diego Mercadal

Co-founder and CEO, Wonder DataLabs

Diego started as a commissioning engineer on synchronous high-voltage motors and generators, joined an offshore drilling contractor as a rig hand, worked several positions in the drilling crew, and moved into its predictive intelligence centre to build models on the equipment he had run. He ended up leading the contractor's AI/ML function.

Mechanical engineer, with an MSc in Statistics from Texas A&M and an MBA from IE Business School. He writes in Field Notes about decisions in heavy industry where the technically right answer and the commercially right answer are not the same.

Writing

The map beats the model

Siemens' AI factory runs on 100+ algorithms, not 100 agents. Why the map of a company's data matters more than the model, and why small models win.

The planner releases it

Anthropic's agents spend about 80% of their time waiting for a person. In a plant, the person decides when an agent may act. Why we start with drafts.

Out of the catalogue

Ask an AI vendor what your problem is and the answer is AI. I am one. We sorted a client's list of checks to automate. About half were reports, not models.

It sent an email

I built a trading bot in 2020 that has never placed an order. What that says about AI agents that trade on their own, and about where the person belongs.

One particle or 125,000

A drilling rig takes solids out biggest-first, for a reason you can multiply out. Brute-force AI runs the line backwards, and the token bill is starting to show.

The queue that matters

A one-day diagnosis, a fix that waited four months for the crop to end — and what “weeks to hours” leaves out.

The forecast was right for one day

A 99% forecast interval of my own, broken on day six — and why the number to read in the ERCOT queue is not the one everyone is quoting.