On April 19, 2021, Google LLC said that Google Cloud Computing would work with the industrial giant Siemens AG to develop new artificial intelligence products that will help ease the process and enhance productivity on factory floors.
The idea is to bring together Google’s cloud, AI, and machine learning technologies with Siemen’s factory automation system so that manufacturers can digitally transform their operations, as communicated by the companies. They added that though many industrial processes are data-driven, most companies are still using legacy software with multiple computing systems to assess the information that comes out of their manufacturing plants.
And doing all that is resource-intensive and inefficient, and that companies need to perform frequent manual updates and checks to ensure that the data is accurate. Above all, only a few manufacturers have started implementing AI at some plants; many projects are isolated “islands” throughout the plant floor. The manufacturers have had faced the struggle to implement AI throughout their global operations.
Long story short, these are the problems that Google and Siemens aim to fix. The idea is to integrate Google’s data cloud and AI and machine learning services with Siemens Digital Industry Factory Automation tools to streamline their factory data and run cloud-based analytics and AI across it. By doing this, manufacturers will get great help to run new applications at the network edge, which was communicated in a statement by Google and Siemens.
Alex Lorenz, a Siemens Vice President, promised that a combination of Google’s AI expertise with the company’s industrial edge systems will transform the scenario for the manufacturers. The announcement of any official products hasn’t been made yet, but it is most likely that the manufacturers will deploy AI at the industrial edge at a large scale, bring automation to mundane tasks, and enhance productivity.
He also said, “The potential for artificial intelligence to radically transform the plant floor is far from being exhausted. Many manufacturers are still stuck in AI ‘pilot projects’ today – we want to change that. Combining AI/ML technology from Google Cloud with Siemens’ solutions for Industrial Edge and industrial operation will be a game changer for the manufacturing industry.”
“By simplifying the deployment of AI in industrial use cases, we’re helping employees augment their critical work on the shop floor,” said Dominik Wee, Managing Director of Manufacturing and Industrial at Google Cloud. “Siemens is a leader in advancing industrial automation and software, and Google Cloud is a leader in data analytics and AI/ML. This cooperation will combine the best of both worlds and bring AI/ML to the manufacturing industry at scale. By simplifying the deployment of AI in industrial use cases, we’re helping employees augment their critical work on the shop floor.”
“Like all functional areas of the enterprise, the shop floor has tremendous upside when it comes to uptake of the AI capabilities,” Constellation Research Inc. Analyst Holger Mueller mentioned.