Artificial Intelligence Promises EUR 60 bn in Incremental Value for German Industry

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in manufacturing could create EUR 60 bn in additional value for German industry. That is the conclusion of the study “The Ghost in the Machine: Artificial Intelligence in the Factory of the Future”, for which the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) surveyed manufacturing and technology managers from about 1100 industrial companies worldwide about their applications of and willingness to invest in AI. Almost 90 percent of executives say they aim to integrate AI in their processes in the next three years. Nonetheless, so far only 28 percent have created a clear strategy for AI in manufacturing. In Germany only 23 percent, or one in four German industrial companies, have developed an AI strategy. 

“When it comes to AI, Germany only ranks around the middle of the pack internationally and is in danger of falling further behind. If German industrial companies want to maintain their leading international position, they must greatly increase the scale and speed of their commitment to new technologies and intelligent automation”, says Markus Lorenz, partner and head in machinery and automation at BCG.

While Germany is still planning, China is already optimizing
As the study shows, companies that already use AI in manufacturing, employ more agile working methods: they test prototypes at an earlier stage and are quicker to readjust their work processes.
The proportion of pioneers is highest in the USA (25 percent), China (23 percent) and India (19 percent). In Germany only about 15 percent of companies currently use AI to any significant extent in manufacturing.

“While most German executives are still wrestling with the basic question of whether and how to apply AI, businesses in China and India are already optimizing their smart factories”, observes the study's author Daniel Küpper, a BCG partner and global head of the firm’s Innovation Center for Operations (ICO). “Emerging market players show more courage when it comes to AI and they keep identifying opportunities to apply the new technologies and improve them on an ongoing basis.”

Ranking of the leading countries in terms of AI implementation
1.  USA 25;
2 China 23;
3. India 19;
4 Canada 17;
5 Poland 16;

AI as a lever to increase productivity
The global sector comparison shows that the automotive and technology industries are at the forefront in applying artificial intelligence. One company in five has already integrated AI in their business in those sectors. At the other end of the scale are the pharmaceutical, medical technology, machine construction and process industry sectors. There, only about one in seven companies uses intelligent manufacturing systems.

“German machine construction in particular stands to gain a lot from artificial intelligence. It enables companies to harness the enormous amounts of data generated by manufacturing machines. This lays the foundation for new business models, making use of predictive maintenance and optimized operations”, says Markus Lorenz, partner and global head of consulting in machinery and automation at BCG.

Almost 70 percent of executives surveyed admit that their company lacks the AI skills to speed up the introduction of new technologies. That applies particularly to data management, analytics and programming. “Companies can no longer advance purely on the basis of their engineering knowledge. Employees have to know how to use AI”, says BCG partner Küpper. All the more reason for industrial companies to upgrade their employees’ skills in the basics of AI in manufacturing systems. “The opportunity for companies now lies in training their employees and attracting AI experts, for example in the field of Deep Learning“, says the study's author Küpper. “You need both to successfully integrate AI in your company: experts who know artificial intelligence and experienced staff who can identify beneficial avenues for its application.”

Atos and Google Cloud Form Global Partnership to Deliver Secure Hybrid Cloud, Machine Learning and Collaboration Solutions to the Enterprise

Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, has entered into a global agreement with Google Cloud to address the digital transformation needs of enterprise customers. This agreement will see the creation of secure solutions in areas including hybrid Cloud, data analytics & machine learning and the digital workplace.

Going beyond the traditional IT landscape, today’s data-centric digital transformation generates an ever-increasing need for data lakes, data management, analytics and cognitive technologies. Machine Learning (ML) is key to discovering and leveraging new business and marketing opportunities, but also demands secure solutions to protect data against cyber risks and ensure compliance.

Addressing this fast-growing demand, Atos is working with Google Cloud to provide businesses worldwide with secure cutting-edge solutions.

Secured Hybrid Cloud. Atos will develop and expand its Canopy Orchestrated Hybrid Cloud with Google Cloud Platform as Atos’ preferred public Cloud platform, leveraging its scale, security, reliability and availability while ensuring data localization. In addition, Atos will also take advantage of specific technology, such as container orchestration with Google Kubernetes Engine, to drive hybrid Cloud adoption in global enterprise organizations. The expanded Atos solution will also complement Google Cloud’s advanced and comprehensive set of security features with a multilayered defense approach delivering enhanced security to customers. The Atos platform will support clients in meeting access and control requirements that European and global regulations demand.

Data Analytics & Machine Learning. Atos will develop a machine learning practice that will leverage Google Cloud’s ML APIs to create industry specific solutions across multiple verticals. 

Digital Workplace. Atos will develop a G Suite practice to further enrich its market leading Digital Workplace offering for enterprise customers. As a Cloud-native intelligent productivity and collaboration suite, G Suite is completely interoperable with other collaboration tools, and will enable Atos to further transform and automate the digital workplace and enhance user experience and productivity.

Thanks to these solutions, Atos will offer enterprises a fast and frictionless way to use Google Cloud technologies alongside their existing assets and processes, while at the same time leveraging data to create new insights and value for their own customers.

Three R&D Centers and Innovation Labs in France, UK and the US to help customers solve business challenges and innovate

To accelerate product availability for customers, Atos will establish three ML/AI customer innovation labs and R&D centers in France, UK and the US. Atos will leverage training from machine learning experts in Google Cloud’s Advanced Solutions Labs to bring the latest advancements in ML to their customers.

“I’m extremely pleased to announce today this first global partnership with Google Cloud, one of the world’s leaders in Artificial Intelligence. Together, we will enable fast and smooth adoption of AI for enterprises,” said Thierry Breton, Chairman and CEO of Atos. “By combining Atos integration capabilities and technology expertise with Google Cloud technology, we enable organizations to thrive in the most innovative and trusted environment, in compliance with global regulations. With this partnership, Atos becomes the “last mile” of the digital information chain.”

“We are excited to collaborate with Atos to bring Google Cloud to more companies,” said Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud. “Together with Atos we will allow companies to transform and improve their business by enabling access to the most advanced Cloud infrastructure, cutting-edge machine learning capabilities and intelligent collaboration tools.”

Starting today, Google Cloud will be Atos’ preferred public Cloud partner. The first phase of the global partnership will concentrate on working with Atos global customers. In parallel, Atos will open new innovation centers for future business transformation projects with its customers.

KNOLSKAPE Expands its Global Consulting Team Globally

KNOLSKAPE, a leading provider of talent transformation solutions for the modern workplace, is proud to announce another milestone for the company. Committed to service the growing learning needs of the world’s largest corporates, KNOLSKAPE announces the expansion of their solutions consulting team across their offices in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai.

The expanded team includes five key hires, who come with diverse corporate experience, and have worked with some of the largest corporations in various industries, across the globe. Collectively, the team comes with experience in human resource management and consulting, strategic HR and Leadership, capability development, succession planning, organizational culture and climate, workplace assessment, facilitation, psychometric testing and assessment, statistical modelling, and program evaluation.

This team’s growth is well matched with KNOLSKAPE ‘exponential global expansion planned in the year 2018-2019. Investing resources in expanding the global solutions consulting team will allow KNOLSKAPE to better anticipate learning needs of organizations across the globe and deliver learning solutions to support just-in-time, accelerated results for capability development, preparing global workforces for the Digital Age.

“KNOLSKAPE has always believed in personalized and accelerated learning, and customer needs are growing; to ensure that we continue to provide the same experience for all our customers as we focus on exponential business growth at a global level, having the right team is important. I am very excited about ournew regime, because they possess a diverse mix of capabilities, and are already adding tremendous value to our clients,” states Rajiv Jayaraman, Founder and CEO at KNOLSKAPE.

Transformative Productivity Efficiency of Over 30 % via Robotic Process Automation is Intelenet's Focus at UAE's MECC 2018

Intelenet Global Services, a renowned global Business Process Services player - backed by Blackstone, today announced that it will be showcasing its BPM-based client centricity value proposition during the Middle East Contact Centre and Customer Experience Conference (MECC) to be held at Dubai from April 24-25, 2018. The company will highlight in particular how its Phantom Robotic Process Automation (PRPA) promises to enable disruptive productivity efficiencies thereby allowing companies to upscale their financial performance quotient. 

Intelenet's Phantom Robotics Automation solution (PRPA)is designed to efficiently expedite complex manual processes which are otherwise plagued by human errors. This state of the art virtual workforce has already been successfully deployed for over 40 pc of its client processes.

Intelenet's PRPA capability covers various back-office functions entire employee lifecycle, which offers our clients access to virtual workforce by automating manual processes, and supporting live agents with intelligent data/reports for decision making. This solution prides itself over the 'one-click' approach with results in as high as 80% straight through processing thereby reducing staff requirement to process transactions.

Another deployment from a workflow optimisation perspective involved accelerating user workflows by Data Masking Field Validations Compliance Logic that resulted in significant reduction of TAT by eliminating verifications process through custom algorithm deployment.

"The possibilities arising out of the convergence of physical with digital are limited only by imagination. In a business environment where unpredictable challenges emerge at a frequency that is undesired, new age solutions such as PRPA offer a tremendous avenue to gain lead start in the transformation pursuit," said Piety Gonsalves Managing Director- Middle East, Intelenet Global Services. 

Intelenet Global Services is a flag bearer of the Government Emiratization Programme has a 3000 strong workforce presence in Middle East. It has a strategic centre of excellence for Customer Management Services for government and multinational clients. 

For more information about the MECC / CX Conference 2018 was held from April 24-25, 2018 in Dubai, UAE

Accelerating Digital Transformation through Automating IT Managed Services

By Nilesh Gupta, Vice President & Global Head – Digital Infrastructure Management Solutions & Strategy (IMS)

The evolution of digital technologies such as Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) is having a significant impact on IT within enterprises. By 2020, a staggering 20+ billion connected devices will be in place, which would be about three times the size of the current world’s population, enabling us to crave for a perfect synchronization with just about everything around us. You will need to decide if you are one of the early adopters of technologies that will drive your business just ahead of your competition, working with the newest and most advanced solutions and leaving your competition to play the catchup game.

Transformation today begins with digital Infrastructure and data is the key theme within the orchestration layers of digital infrastructure. Enterprises have been accumulating data and literally have not even come close to exercising the real worth of it. Empowering business with actionable information can fundamentally change the way business can operate and transform. Here is where automating managed services operations will accelerate digital transformation journey within an enterprise.

So what are the areas one can possibly apply intelligent automation within the IT operations framework? Let’s look into the top three areas where automation is already underway.
Automating Service Desk Operations: We need to relook at how enterprises engage service desk for end-user support. With digital transformation accelerating at very high speed, information technologies are changing rapidly in the way businesses are getting done today. With rapidly changing technologies there are high turnover of services desk engineers that leads to lack of knowledge and experience. This leads to high risks and low quality of services. Besides providing a 24x7 support takes a toll with the costs going north. Enterprises can look into building AI / RPA into their service desk support operations. In fact, with roughly 30-40% of Level 0/1 services desk support cases being repetitive, you can leverage the power of Natural Language Interpretation (NLI) and cognitive automation in the form of AI bots. AI powered RPA and cognitive automation are quickly becoming the main driving force for digital transformation today. Traditional service desk and being transformed to Digital Service Desk providing end users the flexibility to talk to someone anytime from anywhere with 50-70% reduction of costs to handle each incident.

Automating IT Operations Management: Modern enterprises that are adopting Hybrid-IT will need a solution that will allow them to discover everything they have in real-time. Auto-discovery of IT assets and complete visibility of all your IT resources, no matter where they are will also require automation in management of incidents. Automation in streamlining the process of creating and managing incidents, as well as notifying the right teams with correlation between the resources in real-time basis, it becomes even more important on how you handle the false positives from here on. Escalation and alert on critical events to ensure rapid problem resolution and consistent service performance will lead to meaningful insights to providing the actionable information to the CIO organization to better manage the business of IT today.

Integration of RPA/AI in IT Operations Management: The network operations center or the digital command center (as I would like to put it in today’s scenario) is the focal point for a 24x7 IT Infrastructure /Application and Data Monitoring and Management. With everything-as-a-service, connectivity becomes the principle driver for any digital journey. Ensuring health of these connected devices to ensure 24x7 availability is the key element for a greater customer experience (CX).

Enterprise will need to plan to bring in RPA that will perform health check (including security checks) of systems and applications and take corrective remedial actions to ensure the environment performs giving the experience that is needed. Automation on service requests post work-flow approvals coming out of IT service management needs to be automated.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is the important step in the evolution of new business models since it significantly reduces the need for IT service agents to perform routine, rule based, high volume activities, enabling them to instead focus on more innovative ideas.

 Thinkers, enthusiasts, market researchers and many others place 2020 and 2025 as an important milestone in the coming years. Is this because of ‘conversational’ banking, ‘self-driving’ vehicles, and ‘drones’ to deliver packages?  You are talking to ‘robo-advisors’ on market trends and investments, ‘cognitive’ coach on your phone designing your next day diet based on your previous days workouts and the list keeps adding up. To make all this a reality, enterprises that develop or adopt such innovation must have their IT Services automated to handle the kind of demand in implementing Hybrid IT in their journey of digital transformation.

2nd Generation AMD Ryzen Desktop Processors Deliver Best-in-Class Compute Performance and Even Faster Gaming

AMD has announced the global availability of its 2nd Generation Ryzen Desktop processors, starting with four models optimized for gamers, creators, and hardware enthusiasts: Ryzen 7 2700X, Ryzen 7 2700, Ryzen 5 2600X, and Ryzen 5 2600 processors. Using the world’s first 12nm process technology, these 2nd Gen Ryzen processors can offer up to 15% higher gaming performance2,3 than 1st Gen Ryzen processors, while delivering the highest multiprocessing performance you can get on a mainstream desktop PC[iv], and enhanced capabilities including Precision Boost 2 and Extended Frequency Range 2 (XFR 2), an included Wraith Cooler, unlocked performance accessed with the new Ryzen Master Utility[v], and more.

“Last year we started changing the PC industry with the introduction of our first wave of Ryzen processors – delivering more performance, features, and choice to our customers than before. Our 2nd Gen Ryzen CPUs continue this pursuit by raising the standards for enthusiast gamers and creators,” said Jim Anderson, senior vice president and general manager, Computing and Graphics Business Group, AMD. “With this launch we’re also demonstrating that we are just getting started, that we are committed to delivering a multi-generational roadmap of leadership high-performance processors that will drive innovation and competition into the industry for years to come.”

Building on the original award-winning 2017 “Zen” architecture, the 2nd Gen Ryzen processors combine the improved “Zen+” core with other major performance, feature, and platform advancements.

Performance Advances
The new “Zen+” core increases IPC[vi] and reduces both cache and memory latencies[vii] compared to 1st Gen Ryzen processors. AMD’s SenseMI[viii] technology is updated with Precision Boost 2, which enables 2nd Gen Ryzen processors to intelligently analyze the workload and computing environment and contributes in delivering the highest multiprocessing performance in their classes1.

Higher effective clock speeds on all 2nd Gen Ryzen processor cores can improve the performance of Ryzen processors in popular real-world applications like games, creativity and productivity applications2,3,4,5. Gaming experiences are beautifully smooth across popular resolutions from 1080p Ultra to 1440p High to 4K. And, select 2nd Gen Ryzen processors offer up to 20 percent faster content creation than the competition[ix], [x].

With XFR 2 technology on all AM4 platforms with 2nd Gen Ryzen processors, enthusiast PC builders will enjoy even higher performance[xi] in the presence of premium cooling[xii],[xiii]

Feature Advances
Designed with enthusiasts and high performance in mind, 2nd Gen Ryzen processors feature soldered integrated heatspreaders for superlative thermal transfer[xiv], and unlocked multipliers for simple, powerful overclocking5 control. Performance tuning, enabled by the new Ryzen Master 1.3 software, is easier than ever before, and now offers per-core overclocking5 with automatic identification of the potentially fastest cores.

For the first time, the entire line of 2nd Gen Ryzen processors include a world class AMD Wraith Cooler inside the retail box. The flagship AMD Ryzen 7 2700X CPU includes the new Wraith Prism cooler featuring premium thermal performance, an upgraded fan profile, and enhanced lighting capabilities with per-RGB controls.

Platform Advances
Optimized for the 2nd Gen Ryzen processors, new AMD X470 chipset is available on Socket AM4 motherboards now. In addition to enhanced memory compatibility and overclocking5 capability, these new motherboards come with a free download of the new AMD StoreMI technology software, which combines the speed of an SSD and the capacity of a traditional spinning hard disk into a single easy-to-manage drive for faster, smarter, and easier storage[xv].

Compatible with all current AM4 processors, the new X470 motherboards augment the existing 300-series motherboards, which are also compatible with the new 2nd Gen Ryzen processors with a firmware (BIOS) update. Many in-market motherboards already come with the updated BIOS, indicated by a “Ryzen Desktop 2000 Ready” label on the package.

NPCI Wins Golden Peacock Award for BHIM UPI in UAE

 

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has been awarded the prestigious Golden Peacock Innovative Product/Service Award for the year 2018 for its revolutionary product Bharat Interface for Money – Unified Payments Interface (BHIM UPI).

The award was conferred at the presentation ceremony in Dubai last week by His Highness Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Cabinet Member & Minister of Tolerance, Govt. of UAE.

Vishal Anand Kanvaty, Senior Vice President – Innovation & Product, NPCI said, “We are pleased to note that BHIM UPI is gaining wide acceptance from consumers and merchants since its launch in August 2016. We dedicate this award to the commitment and zeal of our member banks and non-bank entities who leveraged this innovative technology for benefit of our economy. This award also assures us that NPCI is heading in the right direction to achieve our vision of being the best payments network globally.”

Manoj K. Raut, CEO & Director, Institute Of Directors (IOD) said, “BHIM UPI has brought out the next level of inter-operability in the retail payment system wherein a consumer can download any of the BHIM UPI mobile app – not necessary his/her own bank application – and still link their existing bank account. Launched with mobile app as the access mechanism, BHIM UPI has also successfully expanded to cater to the needs of users who either do not have smart phones or have smart phones without internet.”

Golden Peacock Awards, instituted by the Institute Of Directors (IOD), India in 1991, are regarded as a benchmark of Corporate Excellence worldwide. The Awards Jury that selected the winners was chaired by Justice (Dr.) Arijit Pasayat, former Judge, Supreme Court of India.