A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Future trajectories of PLM and AI platforms

Future trajectories of PLM and AI platforms
Oleg
Oleg
13 May, 2016 | 3 min for reading

plm-ai-platforms

Happy Friday! Let me think about future PLM moonshot. I want to talk about intersection of product lifecycle and AI. Have you heard about AI (artificial intelligence) recently? Grab few hours during coming weekend and do that. The AI is trending again. I’m saying again mostly for my friends who might remember AI development back 20-25 years ago.

However, spending into research around artificial intelligence and related fields is increasing. Few days ago, my attention was caught by aitrends article – Deep Learning Enterprise Software Spending to surpass $40B worldwide by 2024.

An interesting passage I captured from this article speaks about Deep learning as “enabling technology”:

Deep learning, which has emerged as one of the most active technology areas within the broader field of artificial intelligence (AI), is attracting an increasing level of attention from industries as diverse as advertising, finance, manufacturing, media, and healthcare.  Deep learning is primarily an enabling technology, making areas like machine perception, big data analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT) much stronger.  The technology is especially well-suited for businesses that deal with large amounts of data.

deep-learning-investment

Deep learning as well as intelligence is coming more and more in use cases that supporting other applications or processes. The sense of “hidden force” is interesting. Another article “The Next API is no AI” brings an interesting point about evolving of intelligence algorithms into future AI platforms:

….AI technologies could evolve into a platform, an infrastructure similar to the Internet, that would allow people themselves to decide the way they utilize AI or contribute to its design and development. Such an AI grid, like the Internet of Things², powering various experiences and applications in different environments and industries, being open for tinkerers and specialists alike, would significantly change the way we could understand AI or interact with intelligent systems in general. Human and machine intelligence would be intertwined in unseen ways.

It made me think about future intersection of PLM and AI platforms. Manufacturing is becoming more connected these days. The relationships between OEMs and suppliers, contractors, different product configurations, demand, global manufacturing, etc. All together is a potential grid of information and options that cannot be digested and optimized by a human mind. The dependency of products on software is growing too. A potential crisis in supply chain or software malfunctioning can damage products, delay production schedule or even put people lives at risk. Product information is too complex. Impact analysis is too complicated. Is there a potential to bring AI platforms to solve these problems in the future of manufacturing.

What is my conclusion? The complexity of product information, manufacturing processes and supply chain will be growing in the next 10 years. So, the demand for “intelligent” platforms capable to make analysis and help people to make decisions. Future of intertwined intelligence will come in the intersection of product lifecycle systems and AI platforms. It is a moonshot, but something worth thinking about. Remember, when Sergey Brin was talking about indexing the whole web back in 1995, people were laughing on him. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my new PLM Book website.

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
9 October, 2015

I’ve been on the road for the last few days. It occurred to me that I hardly imagine my travel...

31 October, 2016

The perceived value of product lifecycle management (PLM) is to help companies to boost innovation and improve product development, operation...

10 July, 2017

A novel by Ivan Turgenev “Fathers and Sons” was a real landmark for his time. According to some sources it was...

5 September, 2017

First perceptions are even harder to overcome than most people had realized. Our first impression of a person, place or...

4 January, 2018

The world is moving to the cloud environments. For the last decade the number of enterprise companies using or experimenting...

20 January, 2016

Workflows is one of the fundamental elements of all PLM products today. Workflow abstraction is easy to understand to engineers...

5 July, 2022

How do you envision the future of PLM data modeling? In my earlier posts, I was talking about some of...

6 September, 2012

Cost is important. Period. It drives attention of IT managers and CFOs. With a massive changes cloud and mobile bring...

2 February, 2016

Differentiation and positioning might sounds like a very boring marketing term. But it is actually something that can become very...

Blogroll

To the top