Siemens and Microsoft join forces again to rely on artificial intelligence to improve industrial productivity

•Siemens launches new Teamcenter application for Microsoft Teams, leveraging the power of AI to improve production efficiency and innovation capabilities throughout the product life cycle

•Assistants using Azure OpenAI services can create, optimize and debug software code to help factory automation

•Industrial AI can effectively perform visual vehicle inspections on the shop floor

Siemens and Microsoft recently reached a cooperation to give full play to the synergy of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to help industrial companies continue to improve efficiency and promote innovation throughout the product life cycle. To enhance cross-functional collaboration capabilities, the two parties will integrate Siemens' product lifecycle management software Teamcenter® with Microsoft's collaboration platform Teams, language models in the Azure OpenAI service, and other Azure AI functions. At the upcoming 2023 Hannover Messe, Siemens and Microsoft will work together to demonstrate how generative AI can empower software development, problem report generation, quality visual inspection and other projects, thereby improving factory automation levels and operational capabilities.

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft's Cloud and Artificial Intelligence Division, said: "The deep integration of artificial intelligence and technology platforms will completely change the way we work and the business operating model. By cooperating with Siemens, we will help more industrial companies take advantage of AI. Huge potential to streamline work processes, eliminate information silos, and create a more inclusive collaborative environment to accelerate customer-centric innovation.”

Use AI to promote collaboration and achieve seamless internal connections

Siemens Teamcenter has created a new application software for Microsoft Teams to help design engineers, front-line operators and teams from different business departments achieve closed-loop feedback at a faster speed and jointly overcome challenges. The software is expected to be available in the second half of 2023. With the help of the software, the company's service engineers or production operators can use natural language to record and report product design or quality issues through mobile devices. At the same time, through the service of Azure OpenAI, the application can parse the aforementioned informal voice data, automatically create a summary report, and send it to the corresponding design, engineering or manufacturing experts in Teamcenter. To increase inclusivity, employees can record observations based on their language preferences and then use Microsoft Azure AI to translate them into the company's official language. Microsoft Teams provides a variety of "user-friendly" features, such as push notifications to streamline workflow approvals, reduce the time required to submit design change requests, and accelerate innovation cycles. The combination with Siemens Teamcenter can provide work that cannot use PLM tools. More support for people to participate in the design and manufacturing process in a simple way.

AI-driven automation software engineering ensures continuous factory operation

Additionally, Siemens and Microsoft will collaborate to help software developers and automation engineers accelerate code generation for programmable logic controllers (PLCs). At this year's Hannover Messe, Siemens and Microsoft will also jointly demonstrate how OpenAI's ChatGPT and other Azure AI services can enhance Siemens' industrial automation engineering solutions, including how engineering design teams can use natural language input to generate PLC code, thereby reducing time cost and reduce error rate. At the same time, these capabilities also help maintenance teams identify errors faster and generate solutions step by step.

 Cedrik Neike, member of the Management Board of Siemens AG and CEO of Siemens Digital Industries, said: "Artificial intelligence is becoming one of the core drivers of digital transformation. Siemens and Microsoft will collaborate to deploy tools such as ChatGPT to help businesses of all sizes Enterprise staff achieve collaboration and innovation.”

Use industrial AI to discover and prevent product defects

Detecting defects early in production is critical to preventing costly and time-consuming production adjustments. With industrial AI such as computer vision, quality management teams can more easily scale quality control, identify product differences, and make real-time adjustments faster. Teams from Siemens and Microsoft will demonstrate at Hannover Messe how by deploying Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and Siemens Industrial Edge solutions, machine learning systems can be used to analyze images and videos captured by cameras and be used to build, Deploy, run, and monitor artificial intelligence vision models.

Siemens and Microsoft are long-term strategic partners with thousands of mutual customers and more than 35 years of joint innovation experience. Other areas of cooperation between the two parties include Senseye on Azure, which can help enterprises carry out enterprise-level predictive maintenance, and provide support for customers who host business applications on the Microsoft cloud, making it easy to use Siemens Xcelerator open including Teamcenter on the cloud. Digital business platform solutions. In addition, Siemens will also enter into a partnership with Microsoft on its "zero trust" strategy.