AI Articles and Analysis about Automation and robotics

Dow Chemical (NYSE symbol: DOW) is the largest chemical manufacturing company in the United States, the third largest in the world, and has a market cap of $38.2 billion. 

In the enterprise world, more and more companies are crossing the chasm to test, and then deploy, their first AI solutions. To navigate this sometimes unfamiliar territory, enterprise leaders increasingly scrutinize the AI project selection process.

This article has been sponsored by IBM, and was written, edited, and published in alignment with Emerj’s sponsored content guidelines. 

Founded in 1984 by two computer scientists from Stanford University, Cisco Systems developed the local area network (LAN) concept and achieved a market capitalization of $224 million by the time of its IPO in 1990. Today, Cisco manufactures and markets telecommunications technology as well as other high-technology products and services.

Toyota came to the United States in the late 1950s, setting up its US headquarters in California. A decade later, the Japanese automaker became the third-largest import brand in the United States. In 1968, Toyota introduced the Corolla, now the world’s best-selling passenger car. Today, Toyota is rebranding itself as a mobility company. 

Founded in 2003 as Tesla Motors, the electric vehicle and clean energy company based in California currently has a market cap of over $700 billion - making it more valuable than the top seven automakers combined. Today, Tesla is well-known for its electric vehicles but the company also produces products for sustainable energy generation and storage such as solar panels, solar roof tiles, and more to enable “homeowners, businesses, and utilities to manage renewable energy generation, storage, and consumption”. 

The hypothesis is simple:

Equipment breakdowns or downtime is extremely expensive (imagine a train broken down on isolated tracks, hundreds of miles from the nearest depot)
Heavy equipment (engines, wind turbines, manufacturing machines) produce various streams of data (heat, vibration, time-series, etc)
Machine learning could be used to detect "failure patterns" in that data, helping businesses to maintain equipment health more effectively

In July 2017, The State Council of China released the “New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan," outlining China's strategy to build a US$150 billion Chinese AI industry in a few short years, and to become the leading nation in AI by the year 2030. Other nations followed suit quickly with national AI strategies of their own - with the US trailing behind by nearly two years before developing a semblance of an AI initiative. The proposed 2021 budget for the national security budget in the US is $740 billion - with a billions of dollars being earmarked for AI specifically (learn more: US Public Sector AI Opportunity Report).