Boris Scharinger, AI Strategist at Siemens Digital Industries, discusses the importance of making AI Industrial-grade for enterprises in Dinis Guarda YouTube Podcast. The interview, powered by Businessabc.net and citiesabc.com, also highlights the role of events like AI With Purpose Summit in shaping the future of artificial intelligence with a humanitarian aspect.
Boris is the Senior Innovation Manager and Technology Strategist in the CTO Office at Siemens, leading in the field of Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, and related change and transformation processes. He is the AI Strategist at Siemens Digital Industries, focusing on industrial-grade AI and smart manufacturing.
The AI With Purpose Summit 2024 is the third edition of the event, which took place on June 10th and 11th at the House of Communication in Munich, Germany. According to Boris, the event is an opportunity to bring forth the challenges and solutions in the technology. Powered by the Siemens AI Lab, the event brings together leading experts, industry leaders, and policymakers to discuss the pressing challenges and promising opportunities of integrating AI into various industrial sectors.
“Let’s make AI industrial-grade together”, he tells Dinis. “We need to solve several challenges. All together to finally make it a lot more ubiquitous than it is today. And Siemens works in many areas on that topic. Last but not least, hosting the AI with Purpose Summit as a conference each year, now for the third consecutive time, brings together practitioners from industry to join us in that mission.”
Making AI Industrial-grade: Serving the humanity
Industrial AI is the application of AI in an industrial context. It is designed to meet the rigorous requirements and standards of the most demanding industrial environments. As Boris explains it to Dinis:
“The digital transformation of industry and AI is a strong tool. When I look into AI today, then AI is actually designed and shaped a lot from the consumer space, from the search engines, and from the social media platforms of this word. And in these environments, you can allow for a certain level rate. Yeah, in many cases 90% is good enough. However, in an industrial production process, I cannot have a robot that works in 90% of the cases. I need to have a robotic solution gripping something, for example, and putting it somewhere on a conveyor belt that really must work for me, 24 by seven must work 99.9%, and for example, it must be able to process a thousand picks per hour. Now these industrial tasks require robust reliability. This is what’s essential for industrial AI. Industrial AI, in a sense, is the application field. It’s the application of AI in industrial use cases, our quality ambition. So, AI meets the tough requirements that you have in industrial processes.“
Boris also highlights the importance of simulation and digital twin technology to enhance efficiency and optimising industrial processes:
“The metaverse is a concept that, in a certain sense, has been a bit negative, impacted by or associated right with the metaverse on the consumer side of life. And this is not what we are talking about. No, simulation is first of all important.
We would like to be able to explore the best possible designs, the best ways of production by simulation first before we then push the button and real resources of this real planet are consumed. So it is optimising designs. It is optimising processes because you do it in simulation first.
We really want to design the production line and the pacing of the production line and the different products that are processed by this production line. That’s what we need to simulate to really be able to later on, understand energy efficiency, overall equipment effectiveness, such things.”
Predictive maintenance is another critical area where Siemens leverages AI to enhance industrial efficiency. Boris Scharinger explains:
“There is a lot of potential in the area of predictive maintenance. Because, by, having a strong data ingestion process, by having good data coming from the shop floor, being fed into your system. By having the right data, ingesting the right data, by combining a strong foundation and physics understanding of shop floor equipment and automation systems and now blending that together with AI technology, predictive maintenance is an area which is extremely important for us.”
How is Siemens shaping a smart future with Industrial-grade AI?
Industry 4.0 represents the convergence of digital and physical systems to create smart factories. Boris Scharinger emphasises the importance of connectivity and collaboration in this evolution.
“Having a joint approach between digital industries and smart infrastructure and building a strong solution is what really sets us apart. One important part is that we have built, for example, our industrial operations, X platform that kind of comes from the top from the software side of things. It combines AI applications. It also combines a low code development platform, because what our customers want is not just an AI product out of the box, they want a product that fits their own needs, that fits their own purpose, that can be customised. So building an industrial operations X platform that is able to combine AI and low code and those kinds of things, I think is an important building block of our strategy”.
Looking ahead, Boris Scharinger envisions a future where AI continues to drive efficiency and sustainability in industrial processes. He believes that collaboration and continuous learning are key to staying at the forefront of technological innovation.
“One of the things that I experienced with AI is that, once you have achieved one goal and said, look at this fantastic invention, look at what the technology can do for you and you bring it to your customer, and they say, wow, that’s fantastic, that’s great. But then there’s also the next minute when they ask you, okay, Boris, so what comes next? What else can I do? And so the anticipation of customer requirements and the anticipation of market requirements, this is a continuous process, and this is what it takes if you are in such a field that is so fastly developing as AI is”, he says.
With a driving passion to create a relatable content, Pallavi progressed from writing as a freelancer to full-time professional. Science, innovation, technology, economics are very few (but not limiting) fields she zealous about. Reading, writing, and teaching are the other activities she loves to get involved beyond content writing for intelligenthq.com, citiesabc.com, and openbusinesscouncil.org
