ABB brings AI to industrial applications

In a significant leap towards enhancing industrial processes and productivity, ABB and Microsoft have announced a collaborative endeavour to integrate Azure OpenAI Service into ABB’s Ability Genix Industrial Analytics and AI suite. This expansion of their longstanding partnership seeks to leverage generative AI technology, unveiling latent insights within operational data for industrial clients. This collaboration bears the promise of achieving remarkable efficiency gains, bolstering asset reliability, ensuring operational safety, curbing energy consumption, and reducing environmental impact.

The synergistic relationship between ABB and Microsoft is aimed at incorporating Copilot capabilities into the ABB Ability Genix Industrial Analytics and AI Suite, thus providing a more intuitive user experience. This strategic integration aims to enhance the value of contextualised data, thereby fostering efficiency and sustainability gains across various operational dimensions.

Central to this partnership is ABB’s utilisation of Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to complement their existing Genix capabilities. This involves integrating generative AI, including the utilisation of large language models like GPT-4, into the Genix platform and applications. This novel application, referred to as Genix Copilot, is designed to augment the user experience by facilitating smoother data flow and offering intuitive functionalities such as code, image, and text generation.

The anticipated impact of Genix Copilot is significant. By offering real-time actionable insights, it empowers industry executives, functional experts, and engineers on the shop floor to make informed decisions, leading to increased productivity and more efficient operations. Notably, these insights could potentially extend asset lifespan by up to 20 percent and slash unplanned downtime by as much as 60 percent.

Beyond these immediate gains, the collaboration also recognises the broader industry shift towards sustainability and energy transition. The Genix Copilot solution is poised to play a pivotal role in aiding customers to meet their sustainability objectives. It achieves this by offering advanced monitoring and optimisation insights into industrial greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption.

Moreover, Genix Copilot transcends traditional utility. It acts as a repository of operator knowledge, fostering collaborative decision-making across diverse roles while ensuring data security within the enterprise.

At its core, ABB’s Ability Genix is a modular industrial IoT, analytics, and AI platform imbued with specialised industry knowledge to drive tangible business outcomes. Its implementation has yielded significant results, including up to 40 percent cost savings in operations and maintenance, a remarkable 30 percent boost in production efficiency, and a noteworthy 25 percent improvement in energy and emission optimization. The incorporation of generative AI capabilities into Genix is anticipated to further amplify these benefits.

Rajesh Ramachandran, Global Chief Digital Officer at ABB Process Automation, emphasised the transformative potential of this collaboration, stating, “We believe Genix Copilot will help industrial customers achieve their combined objectives of sustainability, operational excellence, and enhanced asset performance.” Ralph Haupter, President of EMEA at Microsoft, echoed these sentiments, highlighting the significance of leveraging advanced digital capabilities to drive growth and lasting change.

In practical terms, Genix empowers organisations by automating the contextual integration of operational, informational, and engineering data, thereby applying industrial AI to unlock advanced analytics and optimisation. This platform scales seamlessly from individual assets to entire enterprises and is adaptable across various deployment options, including cloud, hybrid, edge, and on-premises setups. Its robust security design, coupled with integrated cloud connectivity and services from Microsoft Azure, ensures its reliability.