Artificial Intelligence is everywhere at the moment. If it's not doing kids' homework for them or releasing chart-topping songs it's fooling the judges at major photography contests.

AI is also set to play an increasing role in the future of manufacturing.

YuMi is the robot charged with showing off the latest AI offering from US tech giant, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. 

The program, created by HPE partners Aleph Alpha, is designed to work alongside humans, not replace them, according to HPE Solution Architect for AI and Data, Andy Longworth.

"What we're doing is we're moving the manpower from one part of the equation to another," Longworth told CGTN Europe. "I don't see it as getting rid of jobs - in many ways it's creating jobs, just in a different place."

To see how this works in action, Longworth gave CGTN a brief demonstration.

If there's an issue with YuMi the operators can take a photo of the robot which can be sent to the system interface.

When this comes back, the Aleph Alpha program will describe what it is looking at and ask the user what the issue is.

The user can then ask questions related to the problem, like "is the robot arm calibrated?" to which the program will quickly provide the answer.

As Longworth points out, while YuMi looks and feels very similar to some other AI offerings on the market, it is tailored specifically to the robots and tasks found in manufacturing.

"The difference here between this and say, for example, something like generalised Chat GPT is that this is trained specifically on the documentation for this robot….robots generally are not calibrated and they won't give you a generalised answer. It will give you an answer specific to the issue."

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With much money at stake and manufacturers potentially open to cyber attacks when using artificial intelligence, Hans-Peter Bauer, Senior Vice President of Cyber Security at Blackberry told CGTN that his company is having to develop its own AI tech.

"That's why we use artificial intelligence in order to secure artificial intelligence in the automation industry," said Bauer. "It learns by itself, so it develops like every artificial intelligence. So it keeps pace with the industry, with the capability for sure, because it's behavioral based. It's not looking at some bad code. It's looking at the behaviour of bad software and applications."

Suzhou-based robotics company HITO makes equipment used in car manufacturing. Its products feature on assembly lines for German car giants VW and BMW in China. 

Its production facility utilises AI tech, but CEO Lyu Rongsheng says it's not a perfect system yet.

"The data model of adding hardware and software to the network has become a new business format, so that more technology companies can cooperate with traditional manufacturing companies and innovative companies," said Rongsheng. "Only when talents can be integrated into a new format can the entire AI use scenario be optimized to a greater extent."

Undoubtedly, using AI for manufacturing is the way forward, but if it's fully autonomous, thinking robots taking human manufacturing jobs that you are worried about, there may still be a few years to go.

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