Siemens has adopted a new AI assistant developed in partnership with Microsoft to improve collaboration in the manufacturing sector and pave the way for wider AI adoption.
Through Siemens Industrial Copilot, users in manufacturing can use natural language input to generate or debug automation code, and maintenance workers can receive timely repair advice.
The firms claimed the assistant could help cut time to produce industrial simulations down from weeks to just minutes, using generative AI to shorten the entire process of running simulations that can help firms probe their supply chains or environments to save money and improve efficiency.
“Together with Microsoft, our shared vision is to empower customers with the adoption of generative AI,” says Roland Busch, CEO of Siemens AG.
“This has the potential to revolutionize the way companies design, develop, manufacture, and operate. Making human-machine collaboration more widely available allows engineers to accelerate code development, increase innovation and tackle skilled labor shortages.”
It is hoped that AI Copilots will be expanded across industries such as infrastructure, transportation, and healthcare.
With this in mind, Siemens and Microsoft have run a joint pilot with the automotive firm Shaeffler AG, and hope to run similar trials in the near future.
“With this next generation of AI, we have a unique opportunity to accelerate innovation across the entire industrial sector,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft.
“We’re building on our longstanding collaboration with Siemens and bringing together AI advances across the Microsoft Cloud with Siemens’ industrial domain expertise to empower both frontline and knowledge workers with new, AI-powered tools, starting with Siemens Industrial Copilot.”
Throughout 2023 Microsoft has released a range of AI products under the ‘Copilot’ banner, including 365 Copilot, Security Copilot, and Copilot for Viva. Alongside new products, the firm has also brought improved generative AI to its pair programmer GitHub Copilot.
In December, Microsoft will release Teamcenter for Microsoft Teams, a new app that bridges communication between workers in the field such as frontline manufacturing staff with engineering teams using generative AI.
It combines Siemens’ Teamcenter, a cross-silo product lifecycle management (PLM) system, with Microsoft Teams to provide an easy platform for communication and digestible data.
Siemens partnered with Nvidia on an industrial metaverse project in June 2022, with the aim of combining virtual models produced by Siemens with real-time AI processing powered by Nvidia hardware.
This involved the integration of Siemens’ Xcelerator digital platform, which will now provide Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service with simulation data to provide the newly-announced assistant with actionable information.
