8 MARCH, 2022OPINIONARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCEThere are many discussions and, let us say it, much buzz about this topic. People in Industry, even more in Manufacturing, are requesting realities beyond the myth. Especially if and how they can boost their business with this technology.Where can we apply it?The applications of AI are numerous. In Air Liquide, we use this framework for our digital transformation strategy: Assets-Customers-Ecosystems (ACE). For the Assets: predictive maintenance, process, and energy optimization, energy management, energy storage, logistics, supply chain, plant design... are some of the fields where AI can push the business forward. However, let us beware of the myth that wants to throw away the "old" technologies such as operations research or computational science and replace it by deep learning. Instead, we combine the best of both worlds. It is feasible, we have already obtained results and we are part of a cross-enterprises collaborative project that will push this "hybridization" frontier forward..For the Customers: recommender systems, customer analytics, pricing, churn, demand forecasting, building new types of contracts...are just some of the applications where AI can incredibly help us to make better decisions or automate processes and improve the Customer experience. We have obtained very positive results with AI in most of those fields.Nonetheless: can everything be forecasted thanks to AI? Our experience shows that we can have successes, for instance, in demand forecasting, but some phenomena are either too complex or we lack information (data) to be able to predict them. So expectations need to be set at the right level, according to the case. Let us now deal with Ecosystems (how employees interact internally/externally). Chatbots and robot process automation are typical applications where AI makes a difference to accelerate processes and improve the Employee experience. And here we have many positive results. For instance, we obtained pretty good employees adoption with a chatbot to onboard new hires.By Dr. Athanasios (Thanos) KONTOPOULOS, Computational & Data Science Scientific Director and Global Lab Leader, Air LiquideTO BOOST SMART MANUFACTURING. MYTHS AND REALITIES.
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