Manufacturers will install 15 million AI-enabled devices by 2024

New market data, compiled by ABI Research, shows that more and more machinery will be equipped with AI-enabled ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) devices in future - despite mainstream implementation not being as seamless as initially expected.

The technology will be used mostly for predictive maintenance and equipment monitoring due to the relative maturity of solutions in these areas.

While monitoring and maintenance uses will continue to lead the way, AI is also gaining momentum in other areas such as defect inspection, where algorithms and ‘deep learning’ technologies are able to pick up product abnormalities that might be missed by conventional machine vision technology. The total installed base for this use of AI is expected to grow from around 300,000 today to over 3.7 million by 2024.

Other uses for AI in manufacturing include ‘generative design’ in product development, production forecasting in inventory management, and production optimisation in the manufacturing phase.

ABI Research said that the growth in industrial AI will be largely driven by ‘edge computing’, where data is processed locally close to production rather than needing to be transferred to the cloud.

Lian Jye Su, Principal Analyst at ABI Research, explained: 

“AI in industrial manufacturing is a story of ‘edge’ implementation. Since manufacturers are not comfortable having their data transferred to a public cloud, nearly all industrial AI training and inference workloads happen at the edge, namely on device, gateways and on-premise servers.”

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