Enhance human ability with AI and not replace – World Manufacturing Forum Reflection

It was an honour to contribute to the World Manufacturing Forum today and have an opportunity to talk about the impact and the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a modern manufacturing environment.

In our discussion I raised two important points companies need to consider on their journey using AI:

1. Anchor the use if AI in tangible business goals
2. Enhance human ability with AI and not replace

Anchor the use of AI in tangible business goals

There is a great article by a great colleague of mine, Chris MacDonald, recently published on the PTC blog about “3 Steps to Apply Artificial Intelligence in your Business“. In this document Chris explains that many projects stall or fail as they are not tied to business goals. He summarised the key actions as:

• Identify organisational paint points and strategic goals
• Align an AI strategy to digital transformation program’s goals
• Roll-out a high value AI-driven use case within your DX program

Enhance human ability with AI and not replace

Too much of the discussion about AI is about replacing what people do. Whilst this is valid in many programmatic and repeatable tasks, much of what is done in manufacturing is fine balance between deep process knowledge couple with artisanal skill. We need to learn to trust AI more in manufacturing and to do that we need to positioning as a way to enhance the ability of the operator, leader and managers in a facility.

• Identify how AI enhances the ability of the worker, not replaces. This will create the future workforce of your organisations
• Build a complementary team of skills for AI, both in terms of AI technologies, but experienced process people.
• Augment the operations of the worker with AI information to guide and improve the quality.
  A great example of this is the use of AR and computer vision combined with AI to help workers improve the effectiveness of the inspection processes.

It was great listening to the other panelists including Kilian Gross of the European Commission and Gilles Savard, CEO, IVADO. The different perspectives from government and academia on this topic were enlightening. It made the discussion informative and rounded (even though we had a few technical glitches along the way!).

I’m looking forward to be able to join the esteemed participants again at the World Manufacturing Forum event in June 2021, hopefully in person…