Think of a world growing without AI and ML and you won't find it happening. Said this, let's explore the scope. How many of you have read the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley or watched the 1920 fictional play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Capek? If you haven't and you have an inclination towards Artificial Intelligence, you must. That's where I see the roots of artificial intelligence, stepping out through creative brains.

What do you first visualise when you imagine a manufacturing unit? You will think of a big space, large machines and workers. There will be machines doing their work at break-neck speed. The workers check the quality of the functioning machines. They ensure that the end product meets the requirements of the clients.

The Google Cloud in 2019, identified six sectors contributing to its growth. These are public, healthcare, financial services, retail, media, businesses, and manufacturing. The cost of quality control and inspection continues to be high in the manufacturing sector. With increasing demand, it is difficult for humans to inspect the defects in computer chips and other products manually. To tackle this problem Google Cloud has announced visual inspection AI.

As the pandemic raged on, enterprises of all scales rushed to accelerate their digital transformation efforts for maintaining business continuity. The retail sector also didn't escape unscathed and had to take a flurry of measures to remain operational amidst rising discretionary spending by consumers. The crisis has pushed the retail organizations to take pivotal digital decisions instantly to achieve tangible business results. One of the technologies that has garnered much attention in these tricky times is Artificial Intelligence (AI). The technology enables organizations to make well-informed data-driven decisions and predict the possible outcome of those decisions.

Running high-volume manufacturing smoothly will involve the perfect functioning of all the machines, resulting in efficient production. The objective of any manufacturing unit is to keep operations at optimum speed with very less downtime. However, every equipment goes through wear and tear and needs servicing and maintenance periodically. The critical question here is, when is the best time to conduct equipment maintenance. Scheduled maintenance is effective or damage control in case of machine failure?

Artificial Intelligence is benefiting to various industries including healthcare, education and manufacturing. But what is Artificial intelligence (AI)? In Layman language, a simulator of human intelligence, which makes the decision after analyzing various data utilizing a collection of different intelligent technologies including machine and deep learning, analytics and computer vision. The fourth industrial revolution is employing AI to enhance its overall efficiency. The technology is not only helping to reduce manufacturing cost as well as it is improving productivity and quality. Manufacturing is a capital-intensive process, and once a plant is a set-up, replacing, removing or renovating is exorbitantly expensive. New machines improve performance; reduce redundancies, while improving overall quality metrics. AI is proving an alternative route to achieve all this and at extremely competitive price points. Instead of now replacing machines, manufacturers are adding AI/ML tools to pre-inspect raw materials identify defects, perform quality evaluations, and a lot more. Many AI solutions currently deployed use vision, which provides an opportunity to further add features like correct labelling, batch numbering, size/dimension mismatches, as well as other visual inspection elements.

Industrial revolutions have involved significant events that have had far-reaching impacts on future generations. There have been only three such industrial revolutions identified up until the beginning of this century. The first one was at the end of the eighteenth century and led by the introduction of the steam engine. The second one was at the beginning of the twentieth century which culminated in the mass production of goods. The third revolution has been happening since 1970 with the increase in commercial and civil usage of computers and the automation of production processes.

New Delhi: With its allocation for the Digital India programme almost doubled in the Union Budget 2018, the IT ministry plans to graduate to the second phase of its roll out with emphasis on promotion of artificial intelligence (AI) and electronic manufacturing. The ministry has set up four committees to encourage research related to AI which will be headed by directors of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Nasscom and eminent researchers, minister of electronics and information technology Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Friday. "These committees will research and work on development of citizen-centric use cases; data platform; skilling, re-skilling, research and development; and legal regulatory, ethical and cyber-security," said Prasad. According to him, a high-level meeting with around 50 participants including 5-6 directors of IITs, Nasscom and private entities was organized to lay out the road map to promote AI in the country. The IT ministry will be coordinating with NITI Aayog on this, he added.

The world is not moving towards a dystopian future just as yet, but one can't deny the effect innovations in the robotics field will have on human life, especially when it comes to a waning workforce as a result of increased use of automation technologies. Experts have already started sounding the warning bells. As per a report published by advisory analyst firm HfS Research in July, the true impact of the emergence of intelligent automation will be felt on the global industry of 15 million IT services and BPO workers, which will see about 1.4 million job losses--a net decrease of 9%--by 2021. In India, the services industry workforce is expected to shrink by 4.8 lakh by 2021, a decline of 14%--HfS Research estimates that the IT services and BPO industry employs about 3.5 million people in the country. Last year, technology research firm Gartner predicted that one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025.