AI for Industry: Where to Start?

Practical AI Solutions for Manufacturing and Industrial Operations — Simplifying Complex Data into Actionable Insights

For many in manufacturing and industrial operations, AI is still a buzzword — or maybe just another chatbot like ChatGPT. But on the factory floor, the question is more practical: Where do we start?

After years of deploying AI solutions across manufacturing, automotive, food production, energy utilities, paper mills, and more, we’ve learned that AI doesn’t have to be complex to be effective. At byteLAKE, we’ve taken the complexity of machine learning algorithms, neural networks, and large language models (LLMs) and distilled them into ready-to-deploy, self-learning applications. We call them Cognitive Services.

What is Cognitive Services? Cognitive Services is byteLAKE’s AI product suite, designed to turn raw industrial data into actionable insights. Based on feedback from clients and partners, we’ve developed five core applications:

1. Predictive Maintenance: This goes beyond standard data analytics. Our AI not only analyzes sensor data but also taps into SCADA, CMMS, and other systems to identify potential issues before they escalate. For example, it can analyze data from SCADA or MES systems and find correlations with reported issues in CMMS to predict equipment failures before they occur. It helps prioritize alarms by analyzing historical data and real-time conditions, filtering out the noise and highlighting critical problems.
2. Production Optimization: This application extracts data from IoT infrastructure, MES, and ERP systems to support decision-making on the factory floor. By analyzing equipment performance, resource utilization, and production schedules, it identifies ways to reduce waste, optimize workflows, and increase efficiency. For instance, AI can monitor data from MES systems and calibrate scales to eliminate excessive weights or monitor production processes to ensure machinery is configured correctly, minimizing waste.
3. Quality Control: Quality assurance is more than just counting defects or identifying visual anomalies. Our Quality Control app can analyze complex manufacturing data — from acoustic signals in engine testing to sensor data in food production — to identify patterns and pinpoint the root causes of errors. For complex manufacturing processes, AI can analyze parameters from intermediate results and detect problems before they accumulate in the final product. This helps prevent small issues from snowballing into major defects.
4. Utilities Optimization: For power and heating utilities, our AI can balance renewable and conventional energy sources, optimize supply temperature, pump pressure, and minimize waste. We’ve deployed AI for energy utility companies, generating optimal configurations for large-scale heating infrastructures by setting supply temperatures and controlling pump pressure at substations. For energy cooperatives, our Cognitive Services often serve as the core of energy trading solutions, balancing renewable and traditional energy sources effectively.
5. AI Chatbot Assistant: Our chatbot can be trained on your company’s data to provide instant, consistent responses to operational queries. It acts as a central hub, pulling data from MES, ERP, SCADA, CMMS, and other systems to provide real-time insights into ongoing tasks, potential issues, and performance metrics. Another example is a chatbot trained on a company’s product specifications and services, supporting both internal and external teams by providing answers to questions about replacement parts, preparing proposals, and perforing other routine tasks like document processing, generating reports, etc.

Why Cognitive Services? By consolidating AI applications into a single platform, Cognitive Services simplifies AI deployment. It connects disparate data sources and systems, turning complex datasets into actionable information that can be accessed from one interface. But how to successfully deploy AI in your company? How to start and what steps are necessary to successfully pass typical milestones in every AI project? I recommend one of my previous articles explaining these: A Comprehensive Guide to Deploying AI in Industries: From Idea to Deployment | by Marcin Rojek | Medium.

Want to learn more about how AI can optimize your operations? Contact us to explore our Cognitive Services and see how we’re helping industrial operations transform data into decisions.