Dinis Guarda interviews Boris Scharinger, AI Strategist at Siemens Digital Industries, in a recent interview of the Dinis Guarda YouTube podcast. During the interview, powered by Businessabc.net and citiesabc.com, Boris discusses how the integration of Industrial AI to process drives innovation, enhances operational excellence, and addresses sustainability challenges. He also highlights the role of events like AI With Purpose Summit 2024 play an important role in shaping the future of developing Industrial-grade AI to benefit humanity.
Boris Scharinger is an AI Strategist at Siemens Digital Industries, specialising in industrial-grade AI and smart manufacturing. With over nine years at Siemens, he is currently the Senior Innovation Manager and Technology Strategist.
During the interview, Boris highlights his role at Siemens as being the leader in technology innovations:
“Siemens has always been a company of engineers driven by passion. We have so many engineers and they like to invent, and many of them have their sandboxes and build stuff. It's all amazing. But to coach them and to give them help and make them understand, what does it takes to make an innovation successful on the market? This is the aspect of innovation management. I think on top of it and having that background, of course, I'm occasionally helpful in helping engineers to mature their product, mature their ideas in a way that they resonate, including resonate commercially on the markets", says Boris.
How Siemens is making AI Industrial-Grade?
Boris also highlights Siemens’ commitment to making AI industrial-grade by addressing the specific needs of industrial applications. He said:
“Industrial AI must meet the tough requirements of industrial processes. We all are impacted by sustainability challenges. We all are impacted by climate change. This is real and this fundamentally impacts the way how industry must work in the future. We must be able, in 10 to 15 years from today, to produce what mankind needs, but with significantly less resources than we are doing it today. And that is a fundamental transformation that we need to see happening in industry, right? For the sake of the future of mankind, actually. And we need to use any weapon that we can get, any tool that we can get that helps us transform industry.”
AI is really needed to speed up simulation processes. We play a crucial role in helping simulation be a lot faster so we can design better products, which translates into consuming a lot less resources than what they are consuming today. The digital transformation of industry and AI is a strong tool.
Boris also highlights the company’s innovative strategies, particularly in leveraging startups and internal platforms to advance AI.
"AI is actually designed and shaped a lot from the consumer space, from the search engines, from the social media platforms of this world. And in these environments, you can allow for a certain level rate. Yeah, in many cases 90% is good enough. However, in an industrial production process, I cannot have a robot that works in 90% of the cases. I need to have a robotic solution gripping something for, for example, and putting it somewhere on a conveyor belt that really must work for me, 24/7 must work 99.9%, and for example, it must be able to process a thousand picks per hour. Now these industrial requirements have robust reliability.
The application of AI in industrial use cases is our quality ambition. And that's why we have coined the term our quality ambition: let's make AI industrial-grade together”, Boris tells Dinis.
AI With Purpose: Making responsible AI a norm for businesses
The AI With Purpose Summit, powered by the Siemens AI Lab, aims to bring together leading experts, industry leaders, and policymakers to discuss the pressing challenges and promising opportunities of integrating AI into various industrial sectors. Its third edition took place on June 10th and 11th, 2024 at the House of Communication in Munich, Germany.
“Let's make AI Industrial-grade together. We need to solve several challenges. All together to finally make it a lot more ubiquitous than it is today. And Siemens works in many areas on that topic. Last but not least, hosting the AI with Purpose Summit as a conference each year, now for the third consecutive time, brings together practitioners from industry to join us in that mission."
Boris also emphasises the critical transition from proof of concept to mature products and discusses the challenges and solutions in making AI industrial-grade.
“It's important to understand that generative AI is something that is new in a way that it tackles and addresses high skill, high labour cost value points. For example, if I have a lawyer and the lawyer is writing, text, right, contract drafts, then generative AI can really support that lawyer. A solid portion of the repetitive work that you used to do can now be replaced or supported, at least by generative AI. But you still need to be skilled.
Generative AI will find its way into many daily places, and we need to make sure that everyone understands how that works and gets upskilled to leverage generative AI for the respective area of responsibility and tasks.
We really need to transform industry to become a lot more powerful and resource efficient, and for this huge transformation of industry in the next 10 to 15 years.”
He also stresses the importance of collaboration, ethical AI, and cybersecurity. Speaking about the Charter of Trust established by Siemens, he told Dinis:
“The Charter of Trust is an organisation that was first based on the understanding that cybersecurity is today such a huge challenge that no company can master that challenge by themselves. We have asymmetrical threats on this planet, so a company cannot fight back on its own. So, governance needs to be made aware of. We need legislation to fight against it and so on and so forth. So Siemens decided to create a foundation that really takes care of things and shapes the future of cybersecurity for society and industry.
The Charter of Trust just has recently extended their work into the area of trustworthy AI. This is an invitation for companies working together and making sure we teach and educate politicians in what type of regulation we need, in what places. We also explain to them what they should be lobbying for by becoming more international on AI legislation and not just have a very strong European focus.
On the other side, we have a consortium of different companies who worked on what we call the AI trust label, which is really an assessment methodology. How would an assessment look to come to a conclusion that my AI fulfils many criteria of explainability, of privacy, of trustworthiness, of avoiding biases? So there is a long way to go with specific AI and safety and industry. I mean, hey, that's our quality promise from a Siemens perspective.”
