KONE & Georgia-Carrier, elevators & paper, gen AI & results
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, argues that Generative AI is “ advancing at lightspeed.”
We agree, with Gartner reporting that 80% of conversational offerings will embed generative AI by 2025, up from 20% in 2024. McKinsey echoes these findings, finding that industry Gen AI adoption has spiked by 72% as it starts to generate true value.
However, the manufacturing sector is notably slower in terms of adoption.
A study by Lucidworks, which surveyed over 2,500 leaders worldwide involved in AI technology decision-making, found that 58% of manufacturing leaders plan to increase spending on AI in 2024.
This is lower than the global consensus of 63% and U.S. consensus of 69%. The root cause of this? Uncertainty. Gen AI’s capacity to generate nonsensical or inaccurate outputs known as ‘hallucinations’ has been well-publicised.
In a recent Lucidworks study, 36% of all respondents expressed concerns about response accuracy due to hallucinations. A higher number of manufacturing respondents at 44%, share this concern.
For some of us, the inconvenience of Gen AI struggling to discern how many r’s are in the word strawberry is where the impact of its fumbles begins and ends. In the manufacturing industry where accuracy is everything, there may be greater consequences.
Two manufacturers that defy this trend are, surprisingly enough, two of the oldest.
Kone, the global elevator and escalator manufacturing giant founded over a century ago in Finland, and Georgia-Pacific, the leading pulp and paper manufacturer established in 1927.
These two manufacturers have embraced generative AI to astonishing effect, successfully taking the technology from concept to strategic implementation and proving that old adage true: with age comes wisdom.
KONE: Gen AI to embrace urbanisation & digitisation
Amy Chen joined KONE in 2021 as its SVP and first Chief Innovation Officer, moving with her family from Beijing to Finland.
Her appointment highlights KONE’s recognition of the necessity of developing a meaningful strategy for digital innovation, as it dramatically changes the business and urban landscape.
With a revenue of more than US$10.9bn in 2023, close to 600,000 customers and over 60,000 employees, KONE is a global leader in the lift and escalator industry. KONE operates across sixty countries, with a maintenance base of 1.6 million elevator and escalator units in 2023.
Supplying Wacker, Finland at Dubai Expo 2020, Beijing Daxing International Airport in China and Nausicaá- Europe’s largest aquarium- the company is driven by a mission to improve the flow of urban life.
Three megatrends drive growth and change in KONE’s industry vertical- urbanisation, technological development and sustainability. It’s these three megatrends that have informed the company’s investment in Gen AI.
“Urbanisation brings 200 000 new people into cities each day globally,” notes Amy.
“Digitalisation is driving a change in our cities as everything becomes connected. KONE moves over one billion people per day, and we play a crucial role in how cities and buildings work.”
The movement of these people and the subsequent design of buildings to facilitate them has critical sustainability implications. Estimates indicate that urban areas are responsible for a shocking 70% of global CO2 emissions, with buildings among the largest contributors.
Additionally, the number of people moving to urban centres continues to rise, with the UN reporting that around 2.5 billion more people will be living in cities by 2050. That’s two out of every three people.
“As cities are continuously growing, this will bring a new kind of pressure to create ease in people flow,” Amy adds.
“ We believe that with the help of new and future technologies, we will be able to build our cities better.”
Gen AI is one of these technologies, which KONE started pursuing through bottom-up Proof of Concepts (PoC’s) before focusing on which projects acquired traction.
Amy notes they also had steadfast support from senior management, both on promoting Generative AI and fully pursuing its implementation. At KONE they believed generative AI had the capacity to elevate their operations and employee experiences, channelling this belief into creating and piloting their Technicians AI assistant.
This assistant enables KONE’s service technicians to access information and knowledge about previous maintenance and equipment faster. KONE technicians could now access the specific product specification info and history of previous maintenance calls for the thousands of different types of elevators within its maintenance base.
“ Traditionally, the technicians have needed to allocate extensive time to find the right information, whereas, with the help of the Technicians’ AI assistant, this phase becomes quicker, helping our technicians overcome troubleshooting faster.”
The technician's AI assistant is also helping KONE enhance sustainability, driving forward its portfolio of green building solutions.
“GenAI is helping us reduce calls on-site and predict better when and what should be replaced with the elevator and escalator parts,” explains Amy.
“With the global magnitude of our service business, reducing calls and replacing parts at the right time helps to decrease emissions.”
KONE’s use of AI augments its 24/7 predictive maintenance machine-learning, which they adopted at an early stage to decrease downtime spent maintaining elevators and escalators.
KONE is also exploring a GenAI-powered chat tool which enables employees to easily access in-depth sustainability-related knowledge and calculations, helping them better address the environmental needs of customers.
“Our rule of thumb is that people are always the centrepiece,” says Amy.
“The most crucial part of the development for Technician’s Assistant is user experience – how can we make it as easy and as attractive as possible for our technicians to use it.”
KONE believes this is the case for almost all digital innovations, building an active AI community with monthly events to promote broader enthusiasm, adaptation and participation in artificial intelligence.
When it comes to effectively pursuing AI, Amy has some vital advice.
“Take the staged, portfolio-based innovation approach, and let speed and probability take the course,” she says.
“I know that we manufacturers prefer to have thorough analysis and perfect plans before putting anything into production.
“It however doesn’t work well with applying new technologies, especially digital ones.”
“Most innovation comes through trial and error, this is also true for gen AI.”
Georgia-Pacific: Gen AI to power safety & sustainability
Georgia-Pacific is a renowned American manufacturer of ubiquitous household packaging and goods brands. From Brawny® paper towels to Dixie® cups, you’ll find their products in public restaurants, medical facilities, restaurants.
In 2023 their revenue was US$17bn, with 35,000 employees across more than thirty US states. Georgia-Pacific is a Koch Industries company, part of a network that has exceeded US$125bn in revenue and employed 120,000 people worldwide from more than 60 countries.
Roshan Shah is Georgia-Pacific’s Vice President of Applied AI and Products. His role specifically addresses the development and deployment of organisational AI solutions that create profound business value.
“We view Technology, and Generative AI in particular, as a key enabler to operations,” he says.
“Generative AI brings forward a lot of potential opportunities, such as helping train and inform our manufacturing employees on best practices that proactively predict failures, alert employees to risks and other problems so they can be quickly addressed and reduce environmental impact.
“This helps our facilities run safer and more efficiently which positively impacts our employees, customers, and the communities we operate in.”
Over the past year, Georgia-Pacific has developed and deployed a range of Gen AI solutions.
The biggest of these is its Operator Assistant, which combines text, images and numerical data to offer corrective, real-time feedback.
With the hazards involved in pulp and paper mills, from pipeline ruptures to explosions to machine malfunctions, this is critical.
“Our approach has been to identify and iteratively deploy technology that helps solve pain points across our organisation,” says Roshan.
“In our experience, deploying solutions quickly and in small steps builds credibility and trust versus waiting for a large solution to come next year.”
Roshan highlights how generative AI has the industry-changing potential to address one of the biggest issues today in the manufacturing industry- the digital skills and hiring gap.
Historically manufacturing workers are long-tenured, with decades of experience they never needed to write down. With these workers leaving the workforce in droves, AI is helping
Georgia-Pacific address the subsequent loss of knowledge and experience.
With Gen AI, vital knowledge and instruction embedded in lengthy documents can be delivered immediately. Georgia-Pacific’s system proactively identifies safety risks, unplanned events and off-quality production parameters and alerts staff.
By helping Georgia Pacific avoid unplanned and unfavourable events, generative AI is also contributing to sustainability.
“There is a direct correlation between operating well and sustainability,” Roshan says.
“If equipment is running optimally, fewer resources are used. As we improve our operating conditions, we expect to see a sustainability enhancement.”
Roshan’s advice on AI is similar to Amy’s- emphasising a precise blend between measured caution and bold risk taking.
“Identifying the right use-cases to learn and grow from, the desire to take some calculated risks, developing partnerships, and experimental discovery instead of grand plans may present the right recipe,” argues Roshan.
To read the full story in the magazine please click HERE.
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