Applications and Use Cases of Artificial Intelligence| ARC Advisory – ARC Viewpoints

Mindtree, a Larsen & Toubro Group Company, was a Gold Sponsor at this years virtual ARC European Industry Forum. Business strategies and models are undergoing a sea change, and it is clear that flexibility, agility, and innovative approaches are required to succeed during these uncertain times. After giving a brief overview, Prabhu Venkatramanan, Head Digital Technology and Solutions, Larsen & Toubro, spoke about the applications and use cases of artificial intelligence (AI). His entire presentation can be viewed here.

India headquartered Larsen & Toubro, with a revenue of $21 billion and presence in over 30 countries, specializes in technology, engineering, heavy manufacturing, and construction, which is one of their largest businesses. However, surveys and reports revealed that the construction industry was a laggard and there was huge potential to improve processes. Hence, it became imperative to understand how digital interventions can improve productivity and efficiency. Focus was on major areas, such as safety of construction equipment and the associated workers. Another aspect was to gauge project progress across multiple global locations with different quality requirements and restrictions. A wide variety of technologies were used to do all this, especially IoT for the connected equipment.

These applications have been running since the digital transformation initiative began four years ago. So, there is a huge amount of data, which is a gold mine, said Mr. Venkatramanan. Armed with this data, they wanted to optimize operations and organizational efficiency. And that is when artificial intelligence made an entry.

The companys Alchemy Construction Intelligence Platform is an analytics engine to identify patterns and generate actionable intelligence.

As most of the projects are distributed across multiple regions, it is tedious for the personnel to read and understand the quality and safety manuals, policies and so on. This can be done using speech; the user can ask the query to a bot in the mobile, and the bot responds to it from the SLP (speech language processing) document side. This bot is connected to all the different digital systems, the safety and quality platforms, and a system for digital stores for looking at material stock availability, material reorder status, minimum availability etc. For personnel on the move or handling many projects, the required information is just a question away. Theres also a screen that accompanies the speech, and this provides the contextual trend and information.

A lot of work is being done in the area of comprehension using natural language understanding (NLU). The company works on many tender documents, and some of the business units work on 20-30 tenders (each is about 1,000-2,000 pages) every week. An AI model has been developed to turn out a three-page summary in three minutes listing the risky processes. This is a tremendous improvement in how fast tenders can be assessed and awarded to contractors.

In conclusion, Mr. Venkatramanan said that the companys focus is on predictive maintenance and managing resources intelligently by using AI. Moving ahead, they would like to be able to predict project delays, but this will involve analyzing thousands of parameters that impact the project.

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Applications and Use Cases of Artificial Intelligence| ARC Advisory - ARC Viewpoints