Monday 21 October 2024

AI and the Workforce The Opportunities and Challenges of Introducing AI in Manufacturing

(upbeat music) - I wonder if in your conversations or in your research, there are examples of building a skills pipeline or developing the workforce of the future, to ensure that the workforce is ready for this disruption. - I always like to start with the people aspect because we are at the junction, at a point in history where, I like to say, virtually there's nothing technology cannot do today, Greg. It is up to the leader, having a very different vision of the future, the leader's ability to execute and create a different culture and bring others along. So to that end, empowering the workforce and dealing with workforce transformation is one of those very, very important pillars. (upbeat music) - What is the dream at MTorres of how AI can be used in the future? - Yes, well, our vision is that our machines that are, very automatic, but they still need one operator of the machine, using them, as the process is very special, this operator has also to become an expert of the process to be able to run the part and lay out the part. So, this knowledge you have to transfer to the operator. Okay? And the operators are very, moving between different, in an industry, between different lines and it's always difficult to have some, experienced workers there. So our dream is that, the machine can be self-aware what is happening in the environment, in the material, on the machine, on the process, on the whole plant, be able to self-verify, auto tune, and even anticipate problems and make decisions or at least propose decisions to a human. Okay? So we currently see that, our machines will not have humans operating the machine, but human supervising and coordinating the work of the machines (upbeat music) - AI is essential not only to business operations, but to society. Give us a sense of the conversations that you're having with customers. - The number one conversation that we're doing a little bit of, kind of creating awareness and education around, is this job elimination. - Yeah. - There's that myth. Our research suggests that yes, jobs will change and 75 million jobs in the manufacturing space will go away, but 133 million new jobs will be created. As we move from agriculture as a society to industrial, we had, Greg, perhaps a hundred years ago, 50% of the workforce in agriculture. Now we have like less than 2% but we have historically very, very high levels of employment, because what we did as a society, we changed the profile, the demographics of the workforce. Now it's time that we do. We go through another wave and then we have to go through that together. (upbeat music) - How do you think about ensuring that Tetra Pak has the right skilled workforce for the future? What solutions, what recommendations do you have? - We have a program called Future Talent where we bring in quite a lot of people directly from university every year. We try to, we recruit from slightly different places now of course with slightly different education with these type of, you know, data science and other type of information technology educations. Then when they start working, I think it's very important that they quickly realize that they have to learn the practical reality of industrial processes as well. Because you can't put together fantastic algorithms that solve a problem that doesn't exist of course. So if you don't understand the problems that do occur in real manufacturing processes, you will designs, you know, the likelihood of designing something that actually solves a problem, is not so high. So being interested in how it is, you know, spend time on factory floors, travel the world, we always introduce them and send them to customers. They have to be on the factory floor, they have to operate machines so they understand what type of problems. They have to work with people who understand that. (upbeat music)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Building Bots Part 1

it's about time we did a toolbox episode on BOTS hi welcome to visual studio toolbox I'm your host Robert green and jo...