Therefore, machine learning technologies significantly reduce powder consumption, production rejects, and labor intensity.

Digitalization is occurring across all manufacturing industries, and the coatings sector is no exception. The quantity of data that can be leveraged to improve all business activities--from new product development to production to customer service--is increasing dramatically. The challenge is to determine where and how to apply technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) and how to make the data on hand relevant to the problem or question of interest. These questions and others were considered by members of the coatings value chain and their insights are presented below. What types of Big Data can be leveraged by the coatings industry to facilitate research, development, and innovation in general? Sapper, Cal Poly: We need to be asking three questions when it comes to data needs in our industry. What data do we have? What data do we need? And what questions are we trying to answer? A lot of valuable data already exists, but it is tied up in reports, published literature, or subject matter expertise. The data is there, but not collected in a way that allows helpful artificial intelligence and machine learning projects to be performed. Understanding what type of data is needed for a particular project is the first step in identifying where that data might already exist.