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Syed Ahmed, a senior member of ASQ, shares his thoughts on the future of quality.

Michelle: Can you tell us how you first got involved in quality?

Syed: So, I did my engineering, and after that, I joined ASQ around 1996. I did my undergraduate in mechanical engineering. Then I saw an article on ISO 9000 and I got interested in that, although I did mechanical engineering, but I was interested in quality and ASQ is the organization, which I joined as a student member. And then I became a member and  I am now a senior member for the last 25-plus years.

That brings me to the quality world. From that day, working at multiple industries, automotive, oil and gas, textile, other manufacturing. But that article was first published by ASME, which is the American Society for Mechanical Engineering, on ISO 9000, which brings my interest to this quality work. And here I am, in this field.

Michelle: What do you think is important for people to know about quality?

Syed: Stay with quality 4.0 and all the kind of trends. This is very important. I am in quality for so many years, I told you, but this paradigm of quality is changing, and it's changing big time. Like, how we do quality.

We used to be a paper-based system. Then we go to digital, but now it's going beyond that, which we term this thing as quality 4.0, which has a lot of stuff, but it is the core of it. Nowadays quality people have to understand how to do generative AI. They have to understand predictive quality. What is predictive quality.

So, my purpose coming here is to explore and there is software out there, which people are working on that. And as a quality professional, if you don't use them, we won't be needed. [It} is the future, but the quality professional without it, I don't see any future for them.