Intel Edge Computing Manager: Get Ready for Industry 5.0

September 3, 2024

Chris Clonts

If you’re just getting comfortable with Industry 4.0, which saw the beginnings of smart manufacturing, digitization and real-time decision-making in factories, a senior leader at Intel says the world is already moving on to Industry 5.0.

What’s Industry 5.0? A joint study by many researchers  describes 5.0 as merging human creativity with intelligent and efficient machines to deliver customized products quickly. But it will take a lot of change and learning to get there.

Sunita Shenoy, Intel’s senior director of product management for edge computing and Internet of Things (IOT) technologies, says manufacturing will evolve so that semi-autonomous machines will become “collaborative” and able to make decisions independently.

Speaking during the annual Siemens Realize Live conference in Las Vegas, she said automobile and semiconductor factories are nearing this already. “If you’ve seen any visuals of an Intel factory, you’ll see a room with no humans in it,” she said. “It is already designed to self-cooperate, and the only humans are sitting behind a control center.”

But she said that’s still not truly autonomous. “They have a little bit of AI, but they are preprogrammed to do certain tasks,” she said, emphasizing her point of view that AI is not a new concept. “AI has gotten very advanced in machine learning and accelerated learning with neural networks, hardware-assisted accelerators, and ‘no-code’ software designed by large language models.” That, she said, makes it possible for AI to increase the autonomous nature of factory machines rapidly.

It doesn’t hurt that management is pushed towards an AI-driven future by the current labor shortages that started severely during the COVID-19 epidemic. The crisis also meant depressed demand for cars, so some manufacturers began making HVAC equipment, personal protection equipment, and more. She said industries that had already aligned their factories in a primarily digital way were able to meet new demands rapidly.

Shenoy also said that one area Intel is working on is the integration of AI into robots themselves for more autonomous decision-making and efficiency in industries, including urban air mobility. That underscores the need for more powerful edge computing that operates locally (i.e., not in the cloud). Outside of manufacturing, she cited autonomous driving as a use case in which the cloud is not a good solution due to the inherent speed lag. Immediate decision-making and data privacy concerns will drive investment in edge solutions, she said.

Shenoy dismissed the concerns of many who worry that developments, particularly in AI, will displace large numbers of workers on the factory floor and elsewhere. “People will learn how to use these machines and technologies and AI and to improve their productivity,” she said. “No, I don't think humans will be replaced. The humans are always necessary for solving complex problems.” She said that even in the transition from Industry 1.0 to 2.0, people adapted. “Everybody learned to retool themselves. So I think the people are not going to disappear. There are already people shortages, right? But they will have to learn new skills. We are learning new skills, right? Even I am learning new skills, learning how to use AI in my day to day life.”

Along those lines, Shenoy said that Intel is working to make AI more natural to use. “Rather than focus on developers… we created some models, we put a simple UI dashboard, and we present it to small and medium manufacturers,” she said. “And we have been innovating and co-inventing with them on what it should look like.” She said the company is commercializing it for teams who want to take it directly from Intel to their system integrator channels. But for those who want to build their own application, we want to make it simple to consume.

“That is one of our biggest learnings: The more complex we make the technologies, the less it will get used.”

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