Post COVID-19 Lockdown Adoption of AI, IoT, and Blockchain expected to Rise in Manufacturing Sector in India

As the lockdown ease and factories are opening, the manufacturing sector in India will see a tremendous pressure to lower costs, increase the effectiveness in methods, lower dependency on humans, and become more resilient to future requirements. This will boost industries to scale up the use of intelligent manufacturing processes controlled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Blockchain.

China is pre-existing in a foremost position in the manufacturing area in terms of AI funding. AI’s market size in China’s manufacturing section is estimated to reach $2 billion by 2025.

Presently, many companies are looking at India as a potential destination for manufacturing opportunities because of the current situation. Therefore the manufacturing sector has to prepare for a great amount of automation.

“Resistance to change is very high in manufacturing sector in India. However, of late there are tailwinds working in their favour. Many organisations want to divest in China and are looking at India as a potential destination. Manufacturing sector will look at it as an opportunity. That will call for tremendous amount of adoption of automation in manufacturing. This will do what industry 4.0 has not been able to do in last few years,” said Arup Roy, research vice president, Gartner.

AI is currently used in manufacturing concerning predictive support for example recognizing and tracking defects in parts, machinery, or manufacturing processes and revealing them on a real-time basis. AI can also help in supply chain improvement by predicting demand as well as returns. The information fed to an AI model comes via the industrial IOTs situated on the manufacturing floor.  This network is made up of the sensors mounted on devices to collect data about their operation and performance in real-time.

The novel coronavirus has also disclosed supply chain network vulnerabilities.  Blockchain can assist companies to recognize the point of disruption by connecting all stakeholders in a vast network, permitting them to plan for probable challenges which may arise in the upcoming times. A sophisticated RPA bot could gather information across manufacturing environments such as warehousing, inventory, suppliers, logistics, vendor systems and use the cognitive power in the tool to implement actions that enhance the overall productivity of the whole system.