“AI will not take your job – but somebody knowing AI will,” said Catherine Jestin, executive vice-president for digital, at the Paris Air Show. “So if you want to still be in the race tomorrow, you will have to really make AI one of your best friends and be comfortable with it.”
Jestin gave the advice as she set out the European aerospace giant’s current use and future vision for AI. Once the preserve of engineering, she said it is now in “all and every function” of the company, including the two other main domains of production and customer services.
In engineering, a lot of the company’s new projects are aimed at generating more design options, Jestin said, before using simulation to eliminate sub-par options much quicker than was previously possible.
Elsewhere, applications include eliminating defects and optimising inventory in production, and enabling predictive maintenance and AI-assisted refuelling of combat aircraft at Airbus clients. Several tools, such as the Skywise aviation data platform and ‘smart’ engineering assistants, are aimed at saving customers money, Jestin said, with Skywise reportedly saving customers a total of $200m per year by collecting and analysing in-flight and engineering data.
In five to 10 years, she continued, AI will be “almost everywhere in the product”. This will include providing pilots with additional information and computer vision assistance during landing, she suggested, helping them land in difficult conditions. Other applications will include widespread use of AI assistants, which will source information and generate options for human workers to decide on.
While Jestin predicted a bright future for AI, she warned that not all use cases so far have worked, with some “big failure”. All potential projects are screened and ranked for their risk levels.
“For the aerospace industry, we need to have secure, reliable and explainable AI,” she said. “That will be the crucial point for our industry.”
The company is investing $50m a year in AI, she said, with a “community” of 250 experts capable of identifying and developing use cases across the company. “For people working in AI, I think there is a bright future,” she said. “[Some] of the work we do… is to also make sure that all employees really start to get interested in AI, try to look at what it is capable of, how it can help, because tomorrow it will be everywhere.”
Thankfully, she said, 46,000 of the 157,000 Airbus employees have taken at least one AI course on the company’s online platform since the start of the year, and half of the workforce is using the Gemini assistant from Google.
‘A question of balance’
Asked by Professional Engineering about the potential risk of engineers becoming over-reliant on AI and losing conventional skills, Jestin said “it will be a question of balance”: “There is one risk that, yes, people become lazy and basically stop to use their brain and rely on the machine – but it's also a way you can use to build knowledge.”
She gave an example from her department, where there was a question over what to do with their 40 mainframe applications. Other than her, “absolutely nobody” was able to code in the necessary Cobol coding language, she said. “But, thanks to AI, we have been able to completely rebuild the documentation on our applications. What is the functional logic behind [them], what are the algorithms? Well, now we have the documentation – which helped us to migrate to the next generation.”
The biggest challenge in applying AI is the quality of data, she said. “You can build whatever algorithm you want – if you don't fill it with the right data, and if you don't have access to the data, basically it's not worth it,” she said.
“In lot of large companies, what is difficult is that the data are siloed. They are in different applications… so the first work that you need to do is to work on building a ‘lake’ where you can gather your data, where you can make sure that the quality of the data has been verified. You can then train your algorithm, or develop your algorithm on a solid basis.”
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.