Displays and demos from the bleeding edge of the manufacturing industry covered over a million square feet of Chicago’s convention center with more than 1,700 exhibiting companies, making it impossible to take it all in as a first-time attendee.
Cutting-edge innovation was present, from the fine precision work on display by machines of impressive size and scale to other exhibits, like 300 pounds of scrap metal pressed into a working 3.5-pound electric guitar. The possibilities, and the sheer scale of data enabling all of it, were breathtaking.
The Partnership
We were honored to be invited by Google Cloud to present our Manufacturing Data Engine (MDE) and Visual Inspection demo at their booth. MDE is one of the key solutions we’ve developed with Google’s product team as part of our partnership in the manufacturing space, and it’s a crucial foundation for any manufacturer’s Industry 4.0 aspirations when it comes to leveraging the power of artificial intelligence. MDE is built for customers reaching new heights with the power of data and digital transformation. Ford, for example, is leveraging MDE as the basis to build a variety of AI and generative AI applications on top of it, to drive value for their business, enabling rapid scale and innovation all at the same time.
The MDE & Visual Inspection Demo
Our demo showed how visual inspection (Vertex) AI and MDE can help manufacturers through the example of laser engravings on cedar key chains. The cedar keychains were engraved on-site before being compared to the standard set by our model, and those that passed inspection were machine-sorted into an approved pile. This data was then fed into the MDE, which could see in real-time a variety of quality control metrics on a Google dashboard measuring temperature, humidity, time of engraving and more.
While simple, the demonstration showed how effective MDE is at handling quality control and defect management. The demo was quite popular, driving heavy foot traffic, demo requests, and a desire for more information.
Happy Hour with Google Cloud
It wasn’t all tech demos and data models, however. We hosted a joint happy hour with GoogleCloud at the booth, which provided a much-appreciated opportunity to chat with other demo owners, learn about what they were working on, and connect with the Google team and clients in a more relaxed environment.
Final Thoughts
Our experience at IMTS reinforced a key lesson in this new age of large language models, artificial intelligence, and machine learning: data is only as powerful as your ability to derive insights from it.
As the Internet of Things, LLMs and other innovations at the edge of the digital transformation revolution make the value of data more and more obvious, data is being collected in an exponentially increasing number of ways. While none of the ground-breaking presentations we saw at IMTS—like hazardous-materials-sorting robots—would be possible without data, manufacturers need data aggregation tools to be able to make sense of it before any business value can be obtained.
This is why Google and GFT collaborated on MDE in the first place: to provide the foundation of Industry 4.0 initiatives by making virtually unlimited data generated from machines on factory floors more manageable. There is simply too much data for any one human (or even a team) to thoroughly review in detecting useful trends or insights. Now, thanks to MDE and GenAI, manufacturing data can be more easily collected, queried, visualized and interpreted through natural language processes than ever before.
And besides, it’s more fun to conversate with your data than to sift through endless lines of code.
See our recap here
