#8: Organisations in the space
- teestadas
- Nov 24, 2018
- 4 min read
Updated: Dec 5, 2018
A MITSloan Business review mentions how the gap between ambition and execution is large at most companies of the world. Three-quarters of business executives believe AI will enable their companies to move into new businesses. Almost 85% believe AI will allow their companies to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage. But only about one in five companies has incorporated AI in some offerings or processes. Only one in 20 companies has extensively incorporated AI in offerings or processes. Less than 39% of all companies have an AI strategy in place. The largest companies — those with at least 100,000 employees — are the most likely to have an AI strategy, but only half have one.
Organizations believe that AI is going to affect different functional areas of their business in the next 5 years.
Transportation Tech companies
Google-Uber-Tesla-Ford-Nissan
In US one-fourth os the greenhouse gas emissions is from transportation.Transportation companies are therefore working hard to develop self-driving cars. Cars that drive themselves, contribute lesser to greenhouse gas emissions as they are driven more efficiently than as when driven by humans. The engine can be smaller and can run on lower gasoline this way. The cars on the roads can also drive closer to each other leaving more space on the roads for the pedestrians or cyclists. However, the counter argument is that with an increase in driverless cars, people would be make more number of trips, thereby reducing the efficacy of the sustainable impact that it was creating in the first place.
Energy companies
Xcel Energy is a utility company that creates electricity from burning coal at its two plants in Texas, one major byproduct is a potent greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide emissions contribute to climate change, as well as harming the ozone layer.
Xcel has equipped its smokestacks in Texas with neural networks, an advanced artificial intelligence that simulates a human brain.The neural network quickly can analyze the data that results from the complex dynamics of coal combustion. It then can make highly accurate recommendations about how to adjust the plant’s operations to reduce nitrous oxide emissions and operate at peak efficiency. Neural networks have helped Xcel Energy — and over a hundred other companies around the world — reduce their nitrous oxide emissions.
Google and Smart Grids
Google's DeepMind technology which became famous for teaching itself to play the ancient game GO through technology called reinforcement learning and becoming the World’s number one player. The team behind the technology announced that its machine learning algorithms could cut electricity usage at Google’s data centres by 15%. This decreased the energy usage by 40% percent and translated into saving hundreds of millions of dollars for Google over several years. This announcement prompted discussions on how such an approach could be used elsewhere. One of such applications is with the National Grid in the United Kingdom.
Airbus A350
Ramping up the new production of A350 aircrafts, the company was facing a new production challenge. As the VP of digital transformation at the Toulouse, France-based company, Matthew Evans declared, “Our plan was to increase the production rate of that aircraft faster than ever before. To do that, we needed to address issues like responding quickly to disruptions in the factory. Because they will happen.” They turned to AI. As he describes,
What the system does is essentially look at a problem description, taking in all of the contextual information, and then it matches that with the description of the issue itself and gives the person on the floor an immediate recommendation. The problem might be new to them, but in fact, we’ve seen something very similar in the production line the weekend before, or on a different shift, or on a different section of the line. This has allowed us to shorten the amount of time it takes us to deal with disruptions by more than a third.
IBM and The Weather company
The Weather company, an IBM Business delivers insights to consumers and business across the globe by combining accurate weather data with AI, IOT and analytics technologies. IBM revealed that it planned to launch its new product called Deep Thunder which will offer precision weather predictions at a 0.2 mile to 1.2 mile resolution for enterprise clients for short-term forecasts. The focus of the Watson product will be on how minor changes of weather can affect consumer behaviour and help businesses to plan their supply chains and stock their shelves.
Autodesk and Generative Design
On Oct 23 at the Seattle Design Festival, a design discussion on creativity and AI was presented by the Microsoft Design team.
“With AI, we can optimize resources to design things that are more interesting and beautiful..We can even use generative design to bring back the Beaux Arts movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries,”
[Noted Blaise Aguera y Arcas, principal scientist at Google, where he leads a team working on machine intelligence for mobile devices]
Another incredible source was the company Patagonia. Indeed they are looking at climate change and sustainability in their products in a serious way. Patagonia’s mission statement reads: “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” Climate change, a devastating symptom of human activity on Earth, is the very definition of this crisis we must overcome if we hope to survive.
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