Xaba's Max Moruzzi to explore how robots that think will reshape the shop floor in CMTS 2023 keynote

Why are the vast majority of robots, cobots and robotic applications falling short in the manufacturing sector? Because even though they’ve been designed with great mechanical bodies — effectively replicating, mechanizing and automating routine actions typically carried out by humans — they lack one essential ingredient: a brain.

That is the message from Massimiliano (Max) Moruzzi, CEO of intelligent automation startup Xaba.

With the latest Gartner report on AI indicating that 85 per cent of all AI projects fail to deliver, Moruzzi will share his perspective on why harnessing the full potential of robotics, machines, and AI has proven to be such a formidable challenge at the upcoming Canadian Manufacturing Technology Show (CMTS), Canada's national manufacturing event, taking place this year at its new venue, the Toronto Congress Centre, from September 25 to 28, 2023.

What’s needed instead, suggests Moruzzi, is a new breed of intelligent autonomous robots that not only understand the context and easily switch between tasks, but also think for themselves, extracting meaningful data on the fly to suggest new ways of working.

Moruzzi’s keynote, entitled Shaping Tomorrow’s Industry: Canada’s Odyssey with Industrial AI, will take place on September 25 at 9:00 a.m.

In his presentation, Moruzzi will explain how the emerging field of industrial AI – intelligent robots that leverage synthetic brains to perform industrial-grade processes that are high quality, safe, consistent, scalable and conform to key performance indicators (KPIs) – is different from existing AI solutions.

“It’s not about deep learning, predictive analytics and computer vision,” said Moruzzi. “This is an end zone presentation where you’ll see this new wave of industrial AI that’s coming, and the impact of working with a machine that can talk to you and use its own knowledge to help solve the business challenges you face. All of a sudden, your shop floor becomes a cluster of knowledge, not just to help you with a particular throughput problem, but also to help you understand how you’ve positioned yourself versus a rapidly changing market.”

At the show, Moruzzi will demonstrate how his company’s AI platform is disrupting vehicle manufacturing by enabling a fully functional car chassis to be created using a robotic system that understands the properties of carbon fibre and is capable of calculating and controlling the material’s variables on its own. He will also outline the tremendous value of industrial AI compared to previous iterations of robotic systems in the North American manufacturing sector.

Moruzzi applauds Canada for taking a lead role in creating the right landscape for industrial AI to thrive by supporting innovative startups as well as technology hubs such as the Vector Institute and strongly believes that the next wave of robotics augmented by AI-powered intelligence is poised to create a vast, untapped market opportunity for corporations of all sizes.