Husqvarna brings gen AI to the factory floor

And not only can users turn to the companion for help, Wickström and his team use the capabilities to make machinery on the factory floor proactive too. If a piece of equipment issues an alarm that something is wrong, for instance, that alarm can trigger the companion to take the initiative, and query possible diagnoses and solutions that it can then provide proactively to an operator.

Simplifying complexities

Husqvarna has been on a digital transformation journey for years, seeking to improve the efficiency of its operations, so the AI Factory Companion is just one piece of the journey. The challenge for the company, and many manufacturers, is that legacy industrial equipment can be in place for decades, and getting data out of that machinery and integrating it with modern systems is no easy task. The need for low latency on the factory floor means some of the data infrastructure needs to sit locally, at the edge. But it also needs resource capacity of the cloud.

Husqvarna’s answer has been to leverage Microsoft IoT Operations as the central hub for collecting and processing data from its industrial equipment. IoT Operations is meant to help organizations transform their physical operations via Microsoft’s adaptive cloud approach, which unifies siloed teams, distributed sites, and systems into a single operations, security, application, and data model.