This new era of AI is driven by the combination of almost limitless computing power in the cloud, the digitisation of our world, and breakthroughs in how computers can use this information to learn and reason much like people do.

By applying advanced AI technologies such as machine learning and cognitive services against the data coming in from the manufacturing process, you now have a value-added layer of insight into your data. This allows you to improve operational efficiencies, speed production, optimise equipment performance, minimise waste and reduce maintenance costs.

Advancements in AI are also opening up a hybrid workforce where people and machines work together. According to IDC, by 2020, 60 percent of plant floor workers at G2000 manufacturers will work alongside assistance technologies that enable automation, such as robotics, 3D printing, AI, and AR/VR.

Pioneers will prevail

While we hear from manufacturers that they believe AI is critical to enabling competitive advantage, not all feel ready to put a strategy in place.

Boston Consulting Group and MIT Sloan Management Review recently interviewed more than 3,000 executives and technology experts in the manufacturing industry about their AI ambitions. They found that the gap between ambition and execution is large at most companies: only about one in five companies has incorporated AI into some processes. Forrester says that 58 percent of business and technology professionals are researching AI, but only 12 percent are using AI systems.

However, industry pundits expect an increasing number of enterprises will adopt AI as capabilities become more adaptable and ubiquitous. Those in the manufacturing industry who start now can expect to see a strong return on their AI investment. IDC estimates that the AI market will grow from $8 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020, when 50 percent of mature supply chains will be using cognitive computing/AI and advanced analytics for deployment-based planning and to eliminate sole reliance on short-term demand forecasts.

According to a recent Infosys report, global business decision makers expect to see a 39 percent average increase in revenue by 2020, alongside a 37 percent reduction in costs with an AI deployment. Accenture predicts that as AI-powered machines eliminate faulty machines and idle equipment, manufacturers will experience consistently rising rates of return, resulting in equally dramatic profit increases of 39 percent by 2035.

Putting AI to work: Microsoft’s approach

As Microsoft helps the industry move to a new world that is going to be made up of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge, we are one step closer to realizing the promise of AI in the manufacturing industry. Our approach to AI is about harnessing the explosion of digital data and computational power with advanced algorithms to enable collaborative and natural interactions between people and machines that extend the human ability to sense, learn, and understand.

The Microsoft intelligent cloud platform offers manufacturers a compelling partnership in your journey to adopt AI. Our business solutions allow you to use AI to drive transformation and automation with accelerators and practices. Our intelligent applications are infused into Microsoft products and services that are core to your productivity, communication, and business processes. Cortana Intelligence helps you to turn data into intelligent action and iterative learning. Our investments in machine learning are transforming Azure into one of the most strategic analytics platforms for manufacturers.

For developers, we offer powerful AI tools and services through our collection of powerful Cognitive Services APIs that enable your apps to intelligently interpret the world and naturally engage your users. The Microsoft Bot Framework makes it easy for you to create new experiences and reach your users at scale. The Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit trains deep learning algorithms to learn like the human brain.

Manufacturers of all sizes are already leveraging the power of AI and the cloud to accelerate performance. Honeywell is a great example of a company that is bridging the physical and virtual worlds with AI to shift the value drivers from Honeywell’s flagship devices to the data and insights they generate.

Jabil is using machine learning to detect and predict manufacturing failures of their circuit boards early in production. As a result, errors can be corrected prior to adding expensive electronic components, resulting in reduced scrapped materials and warranty costs, and an increase in customer satisfaction.

AI is helping the manufacturing industry move from mere predictive maintenance to a new level of predictive intelligence that allows manufacturers to maximise efficiency in a way that equipment rarely—or never—fails. We’ve seen manufacturers such as Rolls Royce and thyssenkrupp leading with these AI-powered preemptive capabilities.

Security is another important application for AI. Uber is using the Face API in Cognitive Services to ensure that its one million drivers using the app match their accounts on file.

Enabling a hybrid workforce

We believe humans and machines will work together to not only boost productivity, but also to create new jobs that are enhanced by AI. Microsoft is focused on infusing computers, equipment, and systems with the ability to reason, communicate, and perform with human-like skill and agility. These applications span anomaly detection to cobots—autonomous robots capable of working together with humans in an office environment. Deep Microsoft investments in the field are advancing machine intelligence and perception, enabling computers that understand what they see, communicate in natural language, answer complex questions, and interact with their environment.

AI has the potential to make workers safer and more productive, but it doesn’t replace people. People are essential. They manage factory floors and highly skilled tasks. They drive innovation and ingenuity. People solve challenges and they are still the most important front “customer service” line.

Over the past several years, customers such as Comau and Sandvik Coromant have re-imagined their approach to manufacturing and are already seeing benefits from combining human and digital intelligence. These advancements include being able to better predict potential failures, keeping plant equipment running efficiently with longer up-time, and providing employees with better tools to manage quality across the manufacturing process.

Between collaborative robots, intelligent bots, drones, and augmented reality, we’re only scratching the surface of what AI and human collaboration can help the manufacturing industry accomplish.

What’s next

As we build intelligence into everything we make, Microsoft is collaborating to lead a growing global conversation around AI’s transformative potential in the manufacturing industry and beyond. We will continue to drive groundbreaking research in AI capabilities and grow our partnerships with top thought leadership organisations to advance the industry.

Our focus is on democratizing AI. That means we’re working to make it easy for you to build and grow your own intelligence capabilities. At Microsoft, our goal is to ensure everyone can and should benefit from the promise of AI.

The Industry 4.0 revolution that is happening in our industry is cumulative. One breakthrough drives the next, and these innovations continue to build on one another. It’s important to have a strong digital infrastructure and strategy in place so you are ready to capitalise on what’s coming next.

Please visit our Microsoft AI site to learn more about how we can help your business get started with AI today.

The post The transformative potential of AI in the manufacturing industry appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

1. Volumes of data continue to rise, totalling nearly 50 zettabytes by 2020 – that’s 20,000 times the total amount of data that existed in the world less than three decades before. The digitalisation of ‘things,’ heightened individual mobility and collaboration and a host of other factors continue to accelerate data proliferation.
2. Advancements in data analytics and intelligence have enhanced our ability to draw value from the data – transforming information into insight that can be acted upon, even pre-emptively and at the point of business processes to maximise impact.
3. And the ubiquity of cloud computing puts this disruptive power in the hands of organisations of all sizes, increasing the pace of innovation and competition.

The convergence of these factors reflects technology’s omnipresent nature, where access to digital services plays an increasing role in everything we do. And they reflect your opportunity to grow, adapt and evolve to meet the changing needs of your customers and the new business opportunities of tomorrow by thinking and operating like a digital company. By developing new capabilities and transforming into a digital company, your business can better leverage every system, device, process and asset in order to draw better insight out of data and convert it to intelligent action. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help you evolve your business to meet the changing needs of customers and capture new business opportunities. We do this through agile platforms and solutions designed to change and adapt; an amazing breadth of technologies that prioritise flexibility, integration and trust; and one of the largest ecosystems of industry-leading partners. Don’t be left behind. I encourage you to get started today. If you are a manufacturer in the industrial, high-tech, automotive or aerospace sectors, and would like to learn how to quickly respond to these trends and reinvent your business for tomorrow, then I encourage you to go here to download our whitepapers. If you would like to see this next revolution in digital transformation for yourself, please join us at Hannover Messe 2017 on April 24–28 in Hannover, Germany. Our industrial innovation showcases will demonstrate how some of the top manufacturers in the world are already realising true business excellence and impactful ROI as a result of their transformations. We’ll give you a hands-on roadmap that will show you how your business can achieve similar results. Twitter: @sanrav

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Across the industry and around the world, today’s digital technologies are enabling industrial manufacturers to transform themselves, to turn themselves into digital businesses. And they are embracing it.

This especially sunk in for me during my international travels this year. From Ireland to Germany and the Hannover Messe industrial fair, we saw tremendous examples of business leaders applying Internet of Things (IoT) concepts to create efficiencies and reduce the cost of doing business.

But beyond transforming business operations and productivity, we also witnessed its powerful potential for industrial manufacturers to not only disrupt their own processes and work smarter, but to disrupt business models and even disrupt entire industries.

The digital disruption

With IoT’s connectivity, rich data platforms, and the unlimited computing capacity of the cloud, part of the digital disruption that is happening is the creation of new, fourth generation manufacturing systems.

Rockwell Automation and Microsoft, for example, recently announced a mobility co-innovation project designed for industrial environments, using a modern, mobile-first architecture to improve productivity and collaboration where a wireless network connection is not always reliable.

These types of new infrastructures are also extending way beyond the factory floor and beyond the operations of the industrial world, creating new global systems of intelligence like we’ve never seen before.

A great example of this is the new partnership that power and automation tech leader ABB and Microsoft are bringing to the automotive industry, with the worldwide availability of a new electric vehicle (EV) fast-charging services platform.

Combining ABB’s EV fast-charging stations with Microsoft Azure cloud-based services, the new platform will ensure stability, global scalability and advanced management features for ABB customers and more advanced charging stations for EV drivers.

Transforming business models

These types of entirely new, intelligent software infrastructures are helping industrial companies transform their business models, now offering advanced services, and generating post-sales revenue streams, in addition to their usual products. In ABB’s case, its next EV iteration will include proactive maintenance and traffic prediction via machine learning and predictive analysis.

These advanced EV stations will be able to serve in a much larger capacity, enabling other businesses, partners and industries to take advantage of the platform, and we will start to see value-added services that will be integrated, all focused on creating a much better, connected experience for consumers.

Future scenarios could include making charging station reservations based on your route and how much charge you have left; proactively scheduling additional services while you wait like changing your windshield wipers; or having some gourmet food delivered to you.

Another impactful example of how technology is helping manufacturers create new service models is the work that Honeywell Building Solutions is doing to turn the business of intelligent buildings into new, intelligent revenue streams.

As a way to optimise efficiency and better monitor the health of its building control systems, Honeywell developed a data-processing environment based on Microsoft Azure that can ingest thousands of events as they happen. The system compares asset-monitoring data streams to models configured to reflect optimal operating conditions—essentially transforming data into useful and timely information that can detect potential equipment failures, substandard performance, or disrepair.

By being able to process and analyse this data quickly, Honeywell can deliver actionable insight, identify trends as they emerge, and respond more quickly, consistently, and precisely to customers’ needs. Customers can then immediately address the equipment fault or maintenance need in the short term and make data-driven business decisions for facility health in the long term. This allows Honeywell to innovate, improve, and add to its service offerings—while offering its customers significant savings and the ability to improve business processes.

Transforming industries

These types of partnerships are a part of a larger trend we are seeing in a number of industries, where traditional industrial companies, as they transform into digital businesses, are beginning to sell new services and experiences and scale up and go global rapidly. And remote monitoring and predictive maintenance scenarios are prime examples.

Beyond ABB and Honeywell, ThyssenKrupp Elevator is applying predictive maintenance and services to the elevator industry. This fall, it released a powerful, proactive service solution for elevators and building efficiency, giving TKE unprecedented capability to provide real-time prediction of future repairs, component replacements and proactive system maintenance, cutting the downtime of existing elevators in half.

These types of new services are also disrupting and transforming the industries in which industrial manufacturers serve, some, like the elevator industry, that have seen little change since the Industrial Age. And as new doors are opened for other businesses, the lines between industries are blurring.

Accelerating innovation for manufacturers

These are just a few of the examples we experienced this year that showcase how IoT and the cloud are helping industrial manufacturers transform their business, and in turn enabling them to bring new ideas and experiences to traditional industries.

This digital disruption will fundamentally transform how people live—from how we get where we need to go, to how the buildings we use will be designed, to how our cities are built. It’s truly a revolutionary time in so many ways.

2015 was certainly a year of transformation for industrial manufacturers. And the opportunities are just beginning. And in Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to build the intelligent cloud, we will continue to accelerate innovation and business transformation for manufacturers.

We look forward to what’s to come!

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