Across every major industry, technological innovation and operational change go hand in hand, and the manufacturing sector is no exception.
The emergence of cloud services in the early 2000s introduced powerful new concepts like highly scalable IT infrastructure, virtual PCs, and centralised global IT management, enabling manufacturers and their employees to work faster, smarter and more efficiently than ever before.
Rapid cloud adoption soon gave rise to the Internet of Things (IoT), transforming the sector by allowing companies to connect their physical assets to digital networks for the first time. This turned ideas such as real-time data collection, predictive maintenance and process automation from fantasy into reality, helping to further cut costs, boost productivity, and avoid costly unplanned downtime.
Fast forward to today, and artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest innovation ushering in a new wave of productivity, with organisations across the business landscape rushing to capitalise on the many potential benefits it has to offer.
However, for the manufacturing industry, realising some of these benefits is proving more difficult than anticipated.
The operational reality of AI
The reason for this is simple. A key hallmark of nearly every leading AI model is their cloud-based nature, meaning they require a constant internet connection to function. This is because these models require massive memory and processing power to function effectively and most digital devices available today lack the hardware needed to run them locally.
Field worker friction
While maintaining internet connectivity is rarely an issue for professionals in office environments, it is significantly more challenging for manufacturing workers who regularly operate in large facilities, warehouses and other challenging locations where internet connectivity can be patchy or limited. Whenever a reliable connection isn’t available, cloud-first AI quickly becomes unviable. Furthermore, the time sensitive nature of most manufacturing work, combined with ever-present safety considerations, means manufacturing professionals simply can’t afford to be reliant on cloud-based AI tools and processes that cease to work as soon as the internet drops out.
Shifting AI to the edge
Fortunately, the emergence of powerful new rugged edge AI solutions is changing this by integrating true AI capabilities directly into devices at a local level for the first time, rather than relying on a cloud-based approach.
At the heart of these devices is an innovative new Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which is specifically engineered to perform AI-related tasks, leaving traditional CPUs and GPUs free to perform more conventional processing tasks.
This unique architectural approach enables devices to run powerful AI models locally, without the need for a constant internet connection. As a result, even workers in remote or challenging environments can take advantage of powerful AI features such as voice and content recognition, automatic transcription, image enhancement, and intelligent assistance, many of which have been restricted to cloud-based models until now.
For example, a maintenance engineer repairing an asset in a large manufacturing facility would traditionally have to run diagnostics and then spend significant amounts of time searching through logbooks and repair manuals to find a solution to the problem faced. However, using an edge AI device, the same engineer can describe the issue they see to the on-board AI model in natural language, which will automatically search pre-installed digital manuals and pinpoint the relevant sections for them in a matter of seconds. The engineer can then choose to read the sections themselves or have the AI model walk them through the repair step-by-step, keeping their hands free to make the repair more efficiently.
Furthermore, the unique architecture of these devices delivers significant energy savings, as the NPU is designed to consume far less power than traditional CPUs whilst performing AI-related tasks – a key advantage in large-scale working environments where long battery life is often crucial. Data security is also improved because sensitive data remains on the device instead of being sent to the cloud, reducing the risk of data breaches.
Bringing the power of AI to every worker
As the AI goldrush continues to rapidly gather pace, organisations of all shapes and sizes are scrambling to capitalise on the many potential benefits on offer. However, for manufacturing leaders, many of these benefits felt out of reach – until now. The emergence of powerful new rugged edge AI solutions is rapidly reshaping the way every worker operates, regardless of what their day-to-day working environment looks like, paving the way for a new technological revolution across the manufacturing industry.
Author: Alexander Gittens, Sales Director UKI & Nordics, Getac
