A new artificial intelligence-based manufacturing augmentation platform developed by Deakin University’s Applied AI Initiative with support from the Australian Composites Manufacturing CRC (ACM CRC) is being made available free to Australian manufacturers, with the organisations saying it aims to improve operational efficiency and simplify data management.
According to ACM CRC, the platform, ForgeX.ai, received $110,143 in co-funding from the organisation and will initially be offered to manufacturers in the composites sector before expanding more broadly.
The platform includes applications that allow manufacturers to use natural language queries to search and analyse data, conduct experiments to optimise processes, and migrate and integrate data across enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
ACM CRC CEO Luke Preston said the platform could help manufacturers better access and use their operational data.
“The potential impact of allowing companies to ‘converse with their own factory’ cannot be overstated. And this version is just a chatbot interface. ForgeX.ai will be more powerful still if developed to offer agentic AI,” Preston said.
He said ACM CRC estimates the platform could deliver efficiency improvements of between 30 and 50 per cent for manufacturers without existing data systems, with somewhat smaller gains for businesses already using digital systems.
“If we could roll it out to just 10 per cent of the addressable market in Australia, it would mean $4.1 billion in economic benefit,” Preston said.
“We also estimate that it can enable the introduction of Industry 4.0 at 1/100th the cost.”
Project lead and Deakin Applied AI Associate Professor Scott Barnett said ForgeX.ai originated from an earlier Australia’s Economic Accelerator-funded project that explored using AI to reduce manufacturing waste by identifying the root causes of defects. The team later expanded the concept to address broader challenges faced by manufacturers that lack in-house software engineering expertise.
“They all depend on software, but typically they don’t have the in-house capabilities,” Barnett said.
“So we went looking at ways to build tools that can help power up people who are perhaps traditionally not software engineers and use AI to bridge the gap as far as we can.”
According to ACM CRC, ForgeX.ai can generate text, charts and images from user queries and is designed to be operated by workers with minimal machine learning training. The platform also focuses on keeping data within Australia and can be deployed on-premise where required to help protect intellectual property.
“It also allows all the content available in an organisation to be easily and effectively structured,” Barnett said.
“We put something over the top of that to make everything more reliable and robust than Excel spreadsheets. So there will be less time spent on administration work, basically.”
Preston said the platform is now available to ACM CRC partners and composite manufacturers, with plans to expand access to other manufacturing sectors next year.
