The news that Foxconn, the world’s biggest contract electronics maker, is developing industrial robots to target 30% automation in its Chinese factories by 2020, has shaken the manufacturing industry. As machines and robotics become more sophisticated and specialised than ever, we can’t help but ask: will manufacturing soon be taken over entirely by robots?
Automation is not just impacting manufacturing; business process outsourcing (or BPO) services are vulnerable too. Companies such as Mattel, Apple and Facebook are well along the road of exploring AI and working out how to transform today’s inferior chatbots into leading-edge, messenger-based interfaces. Experts are predicting this is the kind of digital disruption with the potential to upturn industries. After all, a chatbot messaging service could replace the most common interfaces we currently use on connected devices, completely revolutionising the way consumers connect with companies online and offline in customer service departments. Will it be long before they replace human workers in contact centres?
Robots are also being developed to answer the pressing challenges of business today, including how to tackle big data. In South Australia for example, Complexica has developed Larry, a robot with an algorithm-based persona, that can help businesses make data-driven decisions in real time. While an executive might take a month to work through sales data, Larry can perform the task in just one minute. By considering about 10 million combinations of different prices, products, frequency, Larry can reportedly predict how much more of each combination the company will sell and convert this into weekly averages per state and per store.
To read the full blog post from Intelligent Identification, please visit: http://blog.matthews.com.au/will-we-ever-see-100-automated-manufacturing-facilities/
