Siemens, Google team to scale cloud AI in manufacturing

Siemens has teamed with competitor Google Cloud to optimise factory processes and improve productivity on the shop floor with the mass deployment of machine learning applications. Siemens already has an industrial IoT cloud called Mindsphere but it intends to integrate Google Cloud's data cloud and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) technologies with its factory automation systems. Many industrial manufacturers continue to use legacy software and multiple systems to analyze plant information, which is resource-intensive and requires frequent manual updates to ensure accuracy. In addition, while AI projects have been deployed by many companies in "islands" across the plant floor, manufacturers have struggled to implement AI at scale across their global operations. The combination of Google Cloud's data cloud and AI/ML capabilities with Siemens' Digital Industries Factory Automation portfolio, manufacturers will be able to harmonize their factory data, run cloud-based AI/ML models on top of that data, and deploy algorithms at the network edge.