Technology Record - Issue 33: Summer 2024

104 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 alwaysavailable 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, realtime 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. 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 objectivedriven, 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 at: www.aveva.ai INTERVIEW “ Tomorrow’s leading companies will be those that thread highly specialised AI throughout their operations” Photo: Duke Energy

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