How AI Will Help Hardware and Product Design

With the craze of AI in everything including your food ( I recently got a query for using AI in a cooking robot). I agree AI reduces the development time. But having spent close to 4 decades in Electronics Design and product design, I have realized that AI can't do much when your problems are real world and can't be indexed or trained so an AI assistant can solve that.

Today the CAD tools used in electronic design claim AI-enabled design. In my experience, the design effort is just 20-25% of the whole development. It is the engineering and manufacturing that decides the products' performance and quality. These two phases are predominantly expertise-dependent. Let me give you a couple of examples so that we can understand.

Electronic Products need to pass EMC/EMI standards for selling and we use simulation tools for simulating and ensure in the virtual world the PCB or the Product Passes the standard limits. But when you start manufacturing the inputs for the product like raw Printed Circuit Boards and enclosures, especially Sheet metals come from multiple sources and use different materials for different geographies. It is these that decide whether the products meet the standards or not. These basic input materials and their characteristics can never be fed to an ML or an AI engine because these are never captured as data. The OEM who makes the product probably can extract data from the product's performance from the field and use it. But he can go only to the extent of identifying who supplied the raw PCB but not beyond. Unfortunately, Materials like Sheet Metal and PCBs do have process variations so in real time solving the problem is a must. Here the AI-enabled simulation tools can never predict or offer solutions to solve the issues. Unfortunately, the hype around AI is covering these issues.

Let me share a funny experience. Recently I bought a car from Maruti and I wanted to log in a complaint. At the entrance of the complaint process, the chatbot asked for the name and then the mobile number. I typed "will not share" The chatbot abused me for being dumb but never understood what I typed. Finally, have to write to one of their executives to attend. When I raised this complaint, his cryptic answer was it was their IT division's problem.

I see this in many companies that have migrated to AI chatbots get into this loop. Hathway is another company that will never allow you to enter that you have an issue instead it will force you to an auto-speed test utility and will declare that everything is fine. I found a way to solve this by choosing the option called the billing-related issue the bot records the complaint and Hathway responds through a human call as it pertains to their revenue. When I tell them there is an issue normally the nice souls there will direct me to the right team. What is the point of having an AI bot when it doesn't allow you to record issues?

When I see adverts that claim in 4 months you can become a data science and AI expert makes me wonder about the trivialization of technology. What do you think?