Rebecca Gibson |
Artificial intelligence software is already helping businesses across the industrial sector to work more productively and efficiently, reduce equipment downtime and improve environmental sustainability. AVEVA has already natively integrated the technology into its new CONNECT industrial cloud platform to make it easy for companies to analyse their data for actionable insights. It is now collaborating with Microsoft to develop a generative AI-powered assistant, which will be added to the CONNECT platform in 2024 and provide a subject matter expert at any time to help workers with multiple tasks.
Jim Chappell, global head of AI and advanced analytics at AVEVA, explains how AI is evolving and why solutions powered by the technology will help to make industrial businesses more efficient and sustainable.
Achieving net zero is now a critical priority for industries. How can AI-driven software help to reduce carbon emissions – both now and in the future?
AI-powered solutions are already driving huge sustainability gains across all industries. These technologies are enabling organisations to reduce fuel consumption, improve carbon capture, lower emissions and maximise the lifecycles of their equipment.
AI-driven software can help industrial businesses to engineer faster through suggestive design and simulation, operate at optimal production levels for maximum efficiency, and identify underperforming assets. It can also enable them to provide decision support to connected workers, reduce waste for maximum yield and detect potential equipment failures before they occur. All these advances directly contribute to the individual and collective cessation of global industrial emissions.
AVEVA recently launched its CONNECT industrial cloud platform, which provides a single interface for cloud-based and on-premises applications through a flexible subscription model. How will AI technology be infused throughout the platform and power its performance?
AI is natively embedded throughout CONNECT’s apps, empowering organisations to run smartly by leveraging value from their data through machine learning, smart visualisation and advanced analytics. In addition, both on-premises and cloud data can be sent to CONNECT Data Services to be analysed with AI-powered analytics for optimal operational efficiency and sustainability gains.
Later in 2024, AVEVA will introduce its industrial AI assistant to CONNECT. This patent-pending solution is based on generative AI and a large language model (LLM) that is specifically primed for industries to help customers intuitively locate and analyse data for top performance. Users can also ask complex questions, such as why their factory is operating at lower production levels today compared to last month. The industrial AI assistant breaks down that question into component parts and then queries various data sources to identify the root cause and provide the user with a consolidated answer.
How will AVEVA’s industrial AI assistant support businesses and enable them to become more efficient and sustainable?
Our industrial AI assistant combines an LLM, generative AI and AVEVA’s patent-pending technology to analyse customer data, find issues and help solve problems more quickly. Users can now ask natural language questions with minimal setup required. They can also ask objective-driven questions, which means more complex, multi-step requests can be completed in one single action. This can be automatically combined with other types of AI such as predictive analytics to detect asset and process issues early, allowing industries to quickly make their operation more efficient and thereby reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
With the support of an intuitive AI assistant interface, industrial teams can take advantage of LLM technology that leverages AVEVA’s more than 50 years of industry expertise to meet their desired goals.
What does the future hold for industry-primed LLMs?
Today, industrial LLMs are humanising AI so users can get more value from their data. This capability is expected to evolve and grow, which will incrementally and exponentially help our customers get value from everything we do and software functionality.
This is a big step towards Industry 5.0 where humans and AI work side by side. AVEVA’s industrial AI assistant becomes a type of always-available subject matter expert for workers. Eventually, workers and executives will be able to do their jobs with maximum effectiveness and ease, while ensuring their operations run at optimal and sustainable levels.
How is AVEVA working with Microsoft on its industrial AI assistant and future AI solutions?
Our CONNECT platform sits on top of Microsoft Azure and leverages Microsoft OpenAI services and AVEVA’s patent-pending AI technology. Beyond the first release of industrial AI assistant, we plan to jointly enable more generative capabilities through the technology.
We’re beginning to work with Microsoft on more future-forward capabilities, like being able to create instant, customised dashboards for energy management and so on based on a user’s typed request. It will come to a point where if you can describe it, you’ll be able to create, modify and save it.
We’re also looking at how we can link up engineering information, data analytics and human-machine interface/supervisory control and data acquisition (HMI/SCADA) technologies. It may soon be possible to create operations controls devices in an on-spec, real-time manner.
Can you share real-world examples of how AVEVA AI apps are transforming industrial sustainability practices today?
Companies worldwide are already realising massive sustainability and productivity benefits through applied industrial AI. For example, US power giant Duke Energy saved over $250 million by installing predictive models which reduced errors, quickly identified problematic assets and allowed increased its overall production efficiency. Meanwhile, Schneider Electric was able to prevent three full factory outages by predicting issues in advance.
Duke Energy has saved over $250 million with predictive models by AVEVA
In what ways do you think AI will transform the industrial sector more widely over the next five to ten years?
Firstly, it must be noted that AI is not one thing; it spans many areas and apps which use mathematical formulas. That said, we are rapidly moving from narrow AI towards general AI, where software will have much more human-like capabilities. As the trend continues, AI will become more objective-driven, leveraging everything at its disposal to achieve its goal.
However, AI is not a replacement for human intellect; it should be viewed as an enabling tool and partner. AI will continue to evolve in stages. It is destined to progress from today’s software that assists humans, to software that works alongside humans, ensuring workers will be deeply connected to the technologies through easy-to-use interfaces.
Tomorrow’s leading companies will be those that thread highly specialised AI throughout their operations. The world is quickly becoming ‘AI everywhere’.
Learn more about AVEVA’s AI-based solutions
This article was originally published in the Summer 2024 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.