Guest Attendance of the 11th Annual ABB Technology Forum

The 11th annual ABB Technology Forum took place on November 16, 2020 with the theme of this years’ conference being “AI in medium-sized manufacturing companies”. In addition to respected researchers such as Prof. Martin Ruskowski from the German Research Center for Artifical Intelligence (DFKI) and Dr. Armin Wallnöfer from ABB, our partner Alexander Hendorf from KÖNIGSWEG was in attendance.

The question that was on the minds of both the attendees and lecturers: “How can manufacturing KMU´s use artificial intelligence profitably?” This topic was discussed and highlighted in the context of Smart Factory / Production Level 4, robotics, device manufacturing, and business implementation.

In his lecture, Alexander Hendorf focused on areas of interest that are relevant for production companies, when implementing AI for the entire company:

• What can AI do (or not do)? How well, and how often?
• What roles do change, IT, research and development play?
• Production begins when decisions are made; AI can help support people in making these decisions.
• The drivers of this development are not only the increased computing power and lower costs for data storage, but also open-source software and the free exchange of knowledge.

Hendorf supported his lecture with tangible examples and excerpts from his personal research.