Microsoft AI technology for manufacturing use cases

  • 3 minutes

The next step for manufacturing leaders who want to implement any of these AI use cases is to choose which tools fit best fit their needs. The Microsoft Azure environment includes a wide catalog of products that complement each other to support these AI solutions. Many of them are contained in Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing. Let’s discuss some of the tools that might be most useful for manufacturers.

Photograph showing woman in sharing a manufacturing report.

Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is a cloud-based platform that enables you to build, deploy, and manage AI applications across your entire value chain. It’s important because it provides a unified data environment. It provides data ingestion, integration, processing, and analysis. It connects all your data from different sources. Modern factories are full of sensors and cameras, so a robust data management tool is key to avoiding data silos and taking full advantage of existing data.

Microsoft Fabric has specific AI features for data analytics based on Microsoft Power BI and the generative AI of Azure OpenAI Service. It also integrates with Azure Machine Learning for finer management of AI models.

Azure AI Services

Developing your own AI model from scratch isn’t always the best approach, as it involves building a dataset and training the model, which might be costly and requires certain data science expertise. A wise alternative is to use Azure AI Services, which offers prebuilt AI models and APIs that users can easily customize and deploy.

The catalog of Azure AI Services is large, but some are especially pertinent in manufacturing.

  • Azure AI Search: This platform enables you to retrieve information for your document intelligence applications. It enables you to scan your documentation to quickly find the information you need.
  • Azure AI Vision and Custom Vision: These two services deliver computer vision models, AI models that detect or classify objects of interest in images or video. This technology is key in manufacturing use cases such as anomaly detection.
  • Document Intelligence: The AI models contained in this service enable manufacturers to extract information from your documentation. This tool is most useful in scenarios involving handling printed or handwritten technical datasheets, forms, invoices, ID cards, and other complex layouts. It can play an important role in achieving better management of your suppliers.

Azure AI Studio

Among the prebuilt models included in Azure AI Services, Azure OpenAI Service stands out as an especially powerful tool. Many of the latest AI use cases involve copilot assistants and generative AI solutions. Azure OpenAI Service is a Microsoft tool to develop these kinds of applications since it enables you to use LLMs such as GPT, Embeddings, DALL-E, and Whisper.

These solutions enable you to deliver insights and analytics in a more natural, fluent, conversational way. They can also automatically generate reports, documentation, mail, and so on. Besides, they’re often helpful to streamline the development of traditional AI models. So, you can implement this technology in almost all manufacturing use cases for faster, more efficient results.

Tip

Take a moment to identify some of the benefits of AI you hope to bring to your manufacturing organization. Photograph showing people working and talking around a table.

Now, let’s see how manufacturing companies are using these products. In the next unit, we’ll examine an initiative to optimize forecasting.