BEYOND THE HYPE - ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN MANUFACTURING

摘要

Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to have travelled from sci-fi fantasy to board room hyperbole at warp speed, in no time at all. Whilst it's not surprising that a future working environment with fully autonomous thinking and acting robots is a topic that captures imaginations, trying to work out the relevance of AI to today's manufacturing environment is somewhat less clear. Here, we ask Erik Johnson, chief architect, Epicor Software, to help debunk some common myths around AI and put the hyperbole into some context for manufacturers trying to work out its relevance today. AI is already an over-hyped technology within business. Its important manufacturers understand what it isn't before coming to a decision about what it is and how it should be used in a manufacturing context. Predictive analytics and machine learning are often confused with AI and whilst they have similar capabilities, they don't work in the same way. Where predictive analytics uses historical data to predict the future, AI goes further, analysing more variables to provide more detailed conclusions.