Siemens and Microsoft Push Forward Generative Artificial Intelligence

Siemens and Microsoft are harnessing the collaborative power of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to help industrial companies drive innovation and efficiency across the design, engineering, manufacturing and operational lifecycle of products, the companies report. To enhance cross-functional collaboration, the companies are integrating Siemens’ Teamcenter software for product lifecycle management (PLM) with Microsoft’s collaboration platform Teams and the language models in Azure OpenAI Service as well as other Azure AI capabilities.

“The integration of AI into technology platforms will profoundly change how we work and how every business operates,” says Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud + AI, Microsoft. “With Siemens, we are bringing the power of AI to more industrial organizations, enabling them to simplify workflows, overcome silos and collaborate in more inclusive ways to accelerate customer-centric innovation.”

AI-powered Collaborative Apps

With the new Teamcenter app for Microsoft Teams, anticipated later in 2023, the companies are enabling design teams across business functions to close feedback loops faster, the companies report. For example, service engineers or production operatives can use mobile devices to document and report product design or quality concerns using natural speech. Through Azure OpenAI Service, the app can parse that informal speech data, automatically creating a summarized report and routing it within Teamcenter to the appropriate design, engineering or manufacturing expert. Workers can record their observations in their preferred languages which is then translated into the official company language with Microsoft Azure AI.

Microsoft Teams provides user-friendly features like push notifications to simplify workflow approvals, reduce the time it takes to request design changes and speed up innovation cycles, the company reports. The Teamcenter app for Microsoft Teams can enable millions of workers who do not have access to PLM tools today to impact the design and manufacturing process more easily as part of existing workflows.  

AI-powered Automation Software Engineering

Siemens and Microsoft are also collaborating to help software developers and automation engineers accelerate the code generation for programmable logic controllers (PLC).  

“Powerful, advanced artificial intelligence is emerging as one of the most important technologies for digital transformation,” says Cedrik Neike, member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and CEO Digital Industries. “Siemens and Microsoft are coming together to deploy tools like ChatGPT so we can empower workers at enterprises of all sizes to collaborate and innovate in new ways.”

Finding and Preventing Product Defects

Detecting defects in production early is critical to prevent costly production adjustments. Industrial AI like computer vision enables quality management teams to scale quality control, identify product variances easier and make real-time adjustments even faster, the companies report. 

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.