Artificial Intelligence: A Step Ahead in Product Development and Engineering
Artificial Intelligence

“Success in creating Artificial Intelligence would be the biggest event in human history” −Stephen Hawking.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) or machine learning, is finding its feet in every field. Artificial intelligence has been around us for quite some time now. Even though the technology is still in its nascent stages and is continuously undergoing development, it has found its grip in several industries so far, and the results are remarkable. It has taken over various industries be it stock exchange, marketing, healthcare, or fraud detection.  AI is definitely giving humans a run for their money.

A recent survey revealed that AI is capable of carrying out any intellectual task that humans can do by the year 2050.  Change has always been the face of technology, and as AI technology prevails it can do numerous tasks accurately. There are various instances when technology has been blamed to take away human jobs.  A single machine can seamlessly carry out tasks of few individuals.

The most recent development has been made in the product design and engineering industry. The new era of business is more consumer oriented, where trends, fashion, preferences, and taste change every now and then. This is making it difficult for the industries to cope with the fast change, and simultaneously manage R&D overheads.

Innovation is a survival strategy for technology companies. To manage costs and efficiency it is necessary to be innovative, have a unique designing and development. There is an urgent requirement to speed up the process of development to successfully keep up with the demands of the market, since it typically takes years to develop an idea from conception to commercially valuable product.

Mechanism of Action

AI Product Engineering is an applied field which uses a framework and a set of repeatable tasks with indispensable tools that simplify and automate the process of designing and building new AI products.  Companies are now looking up to AI, to cut down on the development time, which can help to accelerate the research process.

With the help of AI, one can synthesize and suggest hundreds of variations of a design – the engineer can then pick out which one to pursue further.  AI technology can be fed with information from various sectors to produce a unique product. Convergence of knowledge and insights from various interdisciplinary fields is the biggest advantage the AI technology provides.

Generally, humans tend to be slow learners, in comparison with machines. This makes machines smarter and efficient in identifying things that humans can’t identify. Artificial intelligence is destined to aid people have a stress-free, more satisfying life and not to take it away.

A key facet involved in product manufacturing is the competitiveness, and compression in the product development process and the product development cycle time. These factors are the major aspects that affect the profit. AI has the potential to be very useful especially in the field of product design and development. There are various aspects of product engineering which are simplified by AI technology.

Mechanized Analysis of Features

Any person well acquainted with the field of product engineering and development, will agree to the fact that there is always a shortage of quality assurance engineers and analysts. Due to this, there is no means to ensure the standard of the product, leading to the failure in producing quality merchandise.  This leads to consumption of about 30-50% of the product engineers’ time, even before the approval for production. This time could be productively utilized for user research and even competitive research. AI has the potential to test the product as an actual customer and in multiple user sessions, allowing it to find bugs and glitches in the product that would have been dismissed otherwise by QA personnel.

AI Assist with User Experience and Design

For a product to be successful, it needs to be liked by the users. Product should be easy and fun to use, which makes the users appreciate it even more. A lot of creative muscle and research goes into the development and designing of a product. One aspect that is reviewed the most is whether the customers will appreciate and feel the need to buy it, for which the team needs to think out of the box, give value to the client sooner. These challenges are eliminated and it becomes easier for the designers, owing to the huge learning potential of AI technology.  Every user has a different perception of why they need the product, and this data provided by AI can aid the team to develop a more better and customer friendly design.

Providing a Novel and Unique Design

The most intriguing and amazing advantage that artificial intelligence provides is in the design aspect, to let the team know ahead of time whether or not a particular design will be successful or fail. This cuts down the production cost of multiple iterations of a product which are required for testing the product. The company just has to run simulations or mocks to single out the best possible version of the product. Product development or engineering industry, being a manufacturing based industry, AI helps cut down the cost of research and development.

Optimistic and Promising Future of AI

Although certain aspects of the technology like adaptable intelligence need refining, it has proven very helpful to carry out specific small tasks seamlessly. The influence of AI in product engineering is significantly developing very fast. AI has the potential to re-define the product market and working environment of manufacturing oriented companies. It has the power to lead the product industry to economic prosperity.

Artificial intelligence brings in remarkable prospects in the product enterprises to deploy information and people to value creation. With this advancement and AI getting more developed, it is expected that humans will get more empowered with self-learning machines that can create a smarter competition with the human brains. It has the potential to redefine the whole business ecosystem. The solutions that AI has provided has effectively penetrated and influenced the product market positively. By helping in elimination of the repetitive and monotonous work, it requires many more years for development.

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