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So how can manufacturers—particularly those who make products that have significant consequences on people’s health and wellbeing—use digital technologies to improve quality in their assembly operations? While the prevailing orthodoxy is to automate and to replace the worker, there is a new and growing technology that offers a rich alternative: digital assistants that empower the worker on (and off) the line to drive greater quality. Increasingly critical to modern medical device manufacturing, digital assistants make it easy for workers to flawlessly and efficiently build products and ensure the efficacy of the process itself. These assistants simultaneously supplement and enhance the natural talents and capabilities of humans, and assist the augmented employee in making better and faster decisions. They do so by sharing key insights they constantly gather and analyze with the human. How these tools and platforms use AI to create the underlying insights about an assembly line’s productivity or defect rates and help address them are a shining example of collaboration between human and machine on the plant floor.