Industrial artificial intelligence, or industrial AI, usually refers to the application of artificial intelligence to industry. Unlike general artificial intelligence which is a frontier research discipline to build computerized systems that perform tasks requiring human intelligence, industrial AI is more concerned with the application of such technologies to address industrial pain-points for customer value creation, productivity improvement, and insight discovery.[2] Although in a dystopian vision of AI applications, intelligent machines may take away jobs of humans and cause social and ethical issues, industry in general holds a more positive view of AI and sees this transformation of economy unstoppable and expects huge business opportunities in this process.

The concept of artificial intelligence was initially proposed in the 1940s,[3] and the idea of improving productivity and gaining insights through smart analytics and modelling is not new. Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge-Based systems have been an active research branch of artificial intelligence for the entire product life cycle for product design, production planning, distribution, and field services. E-manufacturing systems[5][6] and e-factories[7] did not use the term “AI,” but they scale up modeling of engineering systems to enable complete integration of elements in the manufacturing eco-system for smart operation management. Cloud Foundry service platforms widely embed the artificial intelligent technologies. Cybermanufacturing systems also apply predictive analytics and cyber-physical modeling to address the gap between production and machine health for optimized productivity.