An audience question put a bow on a fascinating panel discussion at Rockwell Automation's #ROKevents Automation Fair today. The discussion featured Danone #packaging and #processing automation engineers explaining their use of Rockwell's always-evolving FactoryTalk AssetCentre tool. The discussion worked working through future features, layers of tech being added, and what brand owners and CPGs might want to see from a potential #AI integration with the tool. The audience member asked: "Regarding AI, I’m seeing a lot of different applications, where each one has some kind of intelligence built into it, or has a lot of predictive features. But is there a central application that could hold all that information and maybe give you some insights of what it’s seeing?" Answered Jon M. (Jon Mills) at Rockwell: "One of the realities of the generative AI that’s powering a lot of these things is that what I would consider to be a turn-key solution doesn’t exist yet for solving problems. So you see AI popping up in all of these tools, but its expression is often very specific to that tool. The reason for that is because you have to interact with the technology in a way that really drives it into trying to solve a specific problem. So having a one-size-fits-all AI solution that is able to interact with multiple systems and try to solve multiple types of problems? I still think there’s probably a technology gap that prevents us from making too much progress in that direction, yet." Added Danone's Jerel Williams: "Thinking about it like we did with robotics development, you have repetitive tasks. I imagine the first step we’re going to see with AI is that we’re going to have to generate a bunch or rungs that are just tedious work, and it’s going to take all that out. The first step of its evolution is going to be doing the simple tasks and correlating varying simpler things together. And as we get used to it, we’re going to see where its limitations are, time will start to push it to the next level. As industry evolves, AI is going to evolve as well." "And you see that same type of evolution in similar product offerings that are out there in the industry," Mills concluded. "I’ll pick on [a code-writing AI assistant product]; it’s basically a coding assistant that lives right inside of your IP. When it was first released, it was basically only able to complete the line of code you were starting. But now, they've released an update that allows you to edit across multiple files, and give it very vague instructions to go out and use chain of thought-style interaction for it to perform more and more complex tasks. So the idea of AI evolving over time, I think is definitely occurring." More here: https://lnkd.in/gGz_6_XU
