At a workshop on AI at the Russian Association of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RAIE) experts reported that companies were moving beyond the pilot stage and rolling out full AI and IIoT applications across their enterprises.
“In 2019, the transition from data science consulting pivots to scalable AI-powered solutions has started taking place on a global scale,” Alexander Smolensky, director of the Working Group on Artificial Intelligence at the Russian Association of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, and business development director at Zyfra Company, said
According to Ekaterina Lyapina, Zyfra’s senior consultant, many companies across the world moved from the experimental stage to the industrial introduction of systems based on Artificial Intelligence and machine vision in 2019.
“Artificial Intelligence techniques help to solve such problems as optimal equipment control, raw materials consumption and quality checking. The relatively new area of computer vision is gaining popularity in industrial robotics and autonomous systems (cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, ships) fields,” she noted.
Experts have analyzed scientific projects and commercial rollouts conducted by research organizations and companies from 27 countries. The largest number of publications are in the USA (32 per cent), China (12 per cent) and Germany (10 per cent). India has made it to the top 10 countries (5 per cent).
Typically, machine learning techniques have been used in discrete manufacturing (44 per cent), in the process industry (22 per cent) and in the electric power industry (11 per cent). A further 23 per cent of projects belong to the industries where AI applications are at early stages of development.
“The main barrier for commercial projects is a lack or absence of data which correctly describes undergoing process. Successful results are mainly achieved by interdisciplinary groups consisting of data scientists, IT specialists and industry experts,” Lyapina added.
During the panel discussion, recommendations were presented for companies planning to be actively engaged in industrial automation and AI services development. Companies have been called upon to organize hackathons to solve problems linked to the AI applications, as well as to build bridges with universities and the academic community in general to solve more fundamental problems in the area of Artificial Intelligence and perform the subsequent commercialization of results.
