Artificial Intelligence and the Fourth Industrial Revolution
We spoke with Nigel Moulton, Global CTO, Modern Data Center Business Unit, at Dell Technologies about AI’s place in 4IR Artificial Intelligence is essential to 4IR as a systemic element present in so much of its expressions. For example, it helps facilitate the design process with ‘generative design’ software to identify design opportunities as well as problems and supply a range of solutions during both the initial design and testing.
Nigel Moulton, Global CTO, Modern Data Center Business Unit, Dell Technologies
Predictive maintenance uses algorithms to predict potential failures in specific elements of manufacturing and generating alerts. Similarly, quality control uses algorithms to monitor quality and identify quality defects in real time without suspending manufacture and generating relevant data for analysis. The safety and optimisation of robotics and human collaboration is also an area where AI has a place. Collaboration is, indeed, a major element of manufacturing to which AI contributes, enabling customized solutions as the result of the interaction of different specialists and specialisms. AI extends beyond the factory to optimise the supply chain and distribution network as well. Nigel Moulton, Global CTO, Modern Data Center Business Unit, Dell Tehnologies, believes that AI will play a pivotal role in 4IR as the technology will be deployed to provide insight that will enable manufacturers to adapt industrial and business processes to become more efficient, or safer, or both: “There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach as each company will use a combination of AI and IoT generated sensor data to shed light and better understand a process. The intended outcome will however determine the way technology is employed, whether that’s an AI to sense, reason (infer) and adapt to produce an output that drives real-time reaction; augmented by Machine Learning (ML) to store and analyse the AI data to improve the outcome over time; or Deep Learning (DL) to infer outcomes through multiple algorithms and data sets.”
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