I don't trust industrial companies to seriously engage in technology. Too many times I've seen a big industrial company buy a startup, just to kill it for big-company reasons. Like, it competes with a cash cow and somebody inside doesn't like that. Or development costs more than another iron shim or whatever they make normally and it looks marginally worse on the books. Or they just don't know how to manage it. Or they don't adopt what they've bought because their processes are ponderous and ossified.

I thought the best bet was to compete with them externally, so they'd have to take notice and react either by buying your solution or hiring you or something. But instead, anecdotally, a big company had a private meeting with the owners of our innovative small company and made a deal to offer some of our products in their showroom. After that all our development projects dried up mysteriously (the next Friday everybody was let go).

So no, I'm not going to invest any (more) of my life's worktime on helping old industrial companies figure it out.