Artificial Intelligence Opportunities: A More Intelligent Manufacturing Industry

In a 2016 article from Business Insider, General Electric described what an ideal intelligent factory would look like. Their vision for the "Brilliant Factory," as they called it, would start with automatic ordering based on detected customer need, and use 3D printing technologies to design, prototype, and test a new part in hours rather than days or weeks. Streamlining production would be next, with highly intelligent robots bearing a majority of the assembly workload. These stages would be continuously monitored by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to detect abnormalities or faults, and eliminate downtime in the process. While posing an interesting trajectory for the manufacturing field, this "Brilliant Factory" remains in the future for now.