AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology is now poised to transform every industry, just as electricity did 100 years ago. Between now and 2030, it will create an estimated $13 trillion of GDP growth. While it has already created tremendous value in leading technology companies such as Google, Baidu, Microsoft and Facebook, much of the additional waves of value creation will go beyond the software sector.

This AI Transformation Playbook draws on insights gleaned from leading the Google Brain team and the Baidu AI Group, which played leading roles in transforming both Google and Baidu into great AI companies. It is possible for any enterprise to follow this Playbook and become a strong AI company, though these recommendations are tailored primarily for larger enterprises with a market cap/valuation from $500M to $500B.

Emerging technology — from the introduction of assembly lines to the Internet of Things — has always defined manufacturing.

With the creation of computers and early automation came traditional machine vision, in which machines analyze photos of parts and components for defects based on a set of human-defined rules. While it reduces human error, traditional machine vision lacks the capacity to solve for pain points like complex defects and changing environments.

Today, more sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI), including machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL), allows manufacturers to use AI-powered visual inspection to enhance quality and reduce costs. But even now, only 5% of manufacturing companies have a clearly defined strategy for implementing AI.

Companies need strategies to overcome challenges in visual inspection, which still relies heavily on human inspectors or inflexible rules-based machine vision. The cost of sending defective pieces to customers — both in reputation and in recalls — isn’t sustainable in a competitive global environment.

The right AI platforms offer tools that can enhance quality control and cut costs — after users tackle key obstacles.

Landing AI’s industrial AI platform consists of a suite of interconnected tools that enables you to build, deploy, manage and scale AI solutions for visual inspection in an end-to-end workflow.

Designed from the bottom up to enable manufacturers to take projects from concepts to scalable solutions with speed, LandingLens minimizes customization and scaling challenges. While AI models are unique, leveraging universal tools can expedite complex projects. Built for evolving data, LandingLens is comprised of a suite of tools to automate machine learning for industrial vision.

As the AI tide takes over all industries, Landing AI’s most innovative, effective, and easy-to-use AI-powered vision inspection platform enables manufacturers to achieve high-quality output. Landing AI offers immense value to its customers through its robust and adaptive AI algorithms, which is constantly improved by some of the best technical minds in the industry and seamlessly updated at the customer site through the cloud. The visionary leadership of Dr. Andrew Ng, the highly driven techno-commercial team, strong vision inspection domain knowledge, and resilience toward ensuring customer success well position Landing AI to remain a market leader in this space.

With its strong overall performance, Landing AI has earned Frost & Sullivan’s 2020 Enabling Technology Leadership Award in the global AI-powered vision inspection industry.

Of the many use cases in manufacturing, visual inspection—a task that involves using human eye or machine vision to verify if a product is free of defects or if parts are correctly assembled—is well-suited for AI. According to a study by McKinsey & Company, AI-powered quality inspection can increase productivity by up to 50% and defect detection rates by up to 90% compared to manual inspection.

Given these benefits, have businesses started using AI in visual inspections? If so, what is the level of adoption, and what are the challenges? These questions and more drove Landing AI, an industrial AI company, and the Association for Advancing Automation to launch this survey on the state of AI-based machine vision.

The survey polled 110 companies from the manufacturing and machine vision industry with both multiple and single choice questions. Respondents who took the survey perform a variety of roles and include C-suite executives, automation engineers and plant managers. One main takeaway is that businesses have high confidence in the effectiveness of AI, and a growing number of companies are already using deep learning-based machine vision for automated visual inspection.

In this report, we will highlight four key findings, detail those discoveries, and provide analysis.