Siemens is releasing a Teams-integrated app powered by generative AI to enhance productivity and innovation for industrial businesses.
The app, Teamcenter for Microsoft Teams, is planned to launch later this year and is a collaboration between Teams' platform, Siemens software for product lifecycle management (PLM), and Azure OpenAI Service's language models, as well as other Azure AI capabilities.
The partnership intends to cover the entire product lifecycle, including design, engineering, production and operation. The solution aims to enhance factory automation and operations through AI-powered software development, quality inspection and problem reporting.
Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and AI at Microsoft, said:
"The integration of AI into technology platforms will profoundly change how we work and how every business operates. With Siemens, we are bringing the power of AI to more industrial organizations, enabling them to simplify workflows, overcome silos and collaborate in more inclusive ways to accelerate customer-centric innovation.
The use cases of the partnership include the Azure AI-powered assistant's ability to augment the creation, optimization and debugging of code in factory automation software.
The solution also aspires to enable better collaboration opportunities for employees, including allowing staff to close feedback loops faster by recording and reporting design concerns in a natural speech through their devices.
Azure OpenAI Service can then parse that informal speech into an automated report which is sent to the relevant team in design, manufacturing or engineering via Teamcenter. The AI assistant can also translate a report from an employee's natural language into the business's official language.
Teams' user-friendly features are integrated into Teamcenter for intuitive processes, including push notifications to approve workflows, which can boost staff productivity.
"Powerful, advanced artificial intelligence is emerging as one of the most important technologies for digital transformation," Cedrik Neike, Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and CEO of Digital Industries, commented. "Siemens and Microsoft are coming together to deploy tools like ChatGPT so we can empower workers at enterprises of all sizes to collaborate and innovate in new ways."
