German industrial firms show how AI will conquer factory floors

The impact of the AI boom on everyday work across various industry is steadily emerging, and workers on factory floors are among those set to witness great change in the coming years.

At a tech industry fair in the German city of Hanover, major German manufacturers are showing off how factory staff will be using AI in the years to come.

In the run-up to the Hannover Messe trade fair, the Heidelberg-based AI start-up Aleph Alpha and the IT service provider Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced a virtual assistant with AI for industrial production.

German manufacturer Siemens, cooperating with the US software company Microsoft, will also present its experiences with the use of AI in industry.

Aleph Alpha and HPE are demonstrating how factory personnel can communicate with AI in natural language and with the aid of images in a live demo at the exhibition centre from next Monday.

"The AI assistant acts more or less like a highly specialised service technician, helping factory personnel to solve very complex tasks," says HPE spokesperson Patrik Edlund.

When talking to the AI, factory personnel do not have to adhere to a predefined system or use only certain key terms, but can talk to the system naturally, as they would with a human.

The AI assistant also responds in natural language, and the dialogue with the bot can take place in different languages, even if the manual is only available in German or English, for example.

Exchanges with the AI-powered robot can take place not only with spoken text, but also via pictures. That means a technician could take a picture of the robot's standing position and ask whether this position is safe.

"In the event of acute problems, the AI assistant can provide decisive information to prevent damage or production downtimes," the two suppliers promise.

It's not only German industrial companies showcasing the influence of AI on factories, but also AI heavyweights from the US. Microsoft will also be showing its developments in cooperation with German industrial giant Siemens.

Here, too, the focus is on the use of AI in industrial production processes.

In contrast to the dialogue with the machine at Aleph Alpha and HPE in natural language, the Siemens and Microsoft project is also about the programme code.

ChatGPT from Microsoft's partner OpenAI is not only able to formulate eloquent phrases like a human, but can also generate lines of code in various programming languages. Siemens is now showing how AI systems can speed up the programming of code for programmable logic controllers.

"Powerful, advanced artificial intelligence is emerging as one of the most important technologies for digital transformation," said Cedrik Neike, Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and CEO Digital Industries. "Siemens and Microsoft are working together to provide tools like ChatGPT to enable employees in companies of all sizes to collaborate and innovate in new ways."

The German-American cooperation also addresses a challenge that is not easy to solve in many industrial companies - namely the detection and avoidance of product defects. Here, the machines are to learn to see with the help of AI.

In Hanover, Siemens and Microsoft will show how images and videos recorded by cameras can be analysed by machine learning and used to monitor and optimise production.