As one of the world’s premier events for industrial technology and innovation, Hannover Messe provides a holistic view of the trends shaping the manufacturing landscape. After a week of non-stop conversations with global and local manufacturers, each sharing a unique perspective across the many different stages of their digital journey, here are the most top-of-mind needs:
- Production-grade generative AI solutions
- Site-level excellence, with the ability to scale
- Openness and composability in digital solutions
1. Production-grade generative AI solutions
Generative AI continued its trajectory as one of the hottest topics in the industry. Last year, while many were intrigued by the technology, the clarity on how generative AI applies to operational environments was still unclear. By now, many have seen product demonstrations, and some have even tested generative AI in pilots, but the consistent sentiment was that generative AI solutions still lack the contextual awareness required in industrial environments.
For manufacturers to truly see value from generative AI, responses and recommendations from use cases like AI copilots must be verifiable and tailored to the needs of the individual industrial users, who are in the field and at the sites making the day-to-day decisions. Additionally, publicly available large language models (LLMs), even when architected with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and knowledge graphs, still lack the industrial context to provide trusted and actionable recommendations. For generative AI use cases to move from proofs-of-concept to production-grade software, industrial organizations require Industrial LLMs that are trained on industrial data such as failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), sensor data, work orders, industrial equipment, and more.
2. Site-level excellence, with the ability to scale
While manufacturers continue to search for the best solutions that can improve process efficiency, reduce unscheduled asset downtime, and enhance connected worker capabilities, too many site-level deployments are still only point-to-point connections, unable to scale from one site to another. As decision-making for operational and digital technologies continues to become more centralized, manufacturers are in search of ways to unify industrial data while staying focused on how to best address their most pressing business challenges.
As manufacturers digitally mature, they must focus on building a scalable and trusted data foundation with industrial DataOps. This approach overcomes the challenge of point-to-point connections and reduces the complexity required to scale digital solutions from site to site. With modern industrial DataOps capabilities, teams can use prebuilt industrial connectors to break down data silos, contextualize and model data into an industrial knowledge graph for easy navigation of insights, and tailor purpose-built applications for use cases such as connected frontline worker or predictive asset intelligence, that solve the unique needs of each site.
3. Openness and composability in digital solutions
Across countless conversations, not having enough data was rarely a concern. While no industrial company lacks data, many expressed the frustrations of getting the right data to the right person or place. With countless software and solutions at individual sites, the challenge is simplifying the flow of data and allowing solutions to share information and insights more easily. Additionally, manufacturing data contains proprietary IP, so the ability to deploy solutions in a non-disruptive way, synergistic with the existing ecosystem, is becoming a critical requirement. This means organizations need the flexibility of deploying SaaS, in a private cloud, or even on-premises.
With IRIS Foundry, SymphonyAI is committed to delivering an open environment with robust and open APIs that can be deployed in any environment. Built on top of Microsoft Azure, and showcased in the Microsoft booth at Hannover Messe, IRIS Foundry and the SymphonyAI industrial product suite work within a manufacturer’s existing ecosystem via integration with Microsoft Fabric and Azure OpenAI Service. Working together, SymphonyAI and Microsoft can help industrial organizations at any stage of their transformation journey scale the impact of industrial AI.
To learn more about how SymphonyAI and Microsoft are working together, join our upcoming webinar on creating a data-driven, scalable backbone for effective analytics & decision-making with industrial DataOps.
