"Revitalizing manufacturing through AI" by Andrew Ng

Source: https://medium.com/@andrewng/revitalizing-manufacturing-through-ai-a9ad32e07814

"AI is already transforming the IT industry." "It is now time to build not just an AI-powered IT industry, but an AI-powered society. One in which our physical needs, health care, transportation, food, and lodging are more accessible through AI, and where every person is freed from repetitive mental drudgery. For the whole world to experience the benefits of AI, it must pervade many industries, not just the IT industry."

The IT industry has primarily shaped our digital environment. Manufacturing touches nearly every part of our society by shaping our physical environment. It is through manufacturing that human creativity goes beyond pixels on a display to become physical objects. By bringing AI to manufacturing, we will deliver a digital transformation to the physical world.

AI technology is well suited to addressing the challenges facing manufacturing, such as variable quality and yield, inflexible production line design, inability to manage capacity, and rising production costs. AI can help address these issues, and improve quality control, shorten design cycles, remove supply-chain bottlenecks, reduce materials and energy waste, and improve production yields."

"Many companies are figuring out how to use AI, but this is not easy. The technology is still complex, and few teams understand AI well enough to implement it effectively. Outside the IT industry, almost no companies have enough access to AI talent.

Further, just as using IT to transform a traditional company requires more than building a website, using AI to transform a company requires much more than training a few machine learning models. The strategy of integrating AI — everything from data acquisition, to organizational structure design, to figuring out how to prioritize AI projects — is as complex as the technology, and good AI strategists are even rarer than good AI technologists."