Posco, Amazon to build an ‘AI engineer’ for factories

Posco signed a memorandum of understanding with Amazon Web Services to accelerate the adoption of AI at industrial sites.

Posco DX CEO Shim Min-suk (fifth from left) and AWS Korea general manager Ham Kee-ho (sixth from left), along with other company officials, pose for a photo after signing a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on expanding AI adoption in industrial sites. [POSCO DX]

Posco will team up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate the adoption of AI at industrial sites.

The steelmaker said Sunday that it had signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with AWS on Friday at its office in Pangyo, Gyeonggi. The signing ceremony was attended by Posco DX CEO Shim Min-suk and AWS Korea Managing Director Ham Kee-ho.

Posco plans to use Amazon’s Bedrock model library and SageMaker algorithm development platform to deploy an AI engineer optimized for industrial sites. The agent will analyze data required for on-site system designs as well as generate blueprints and completion reports.

The group also aims to enhance the efficiency of operating programmable logic controller systems, which control individual facilities. Currently, engineers must manually write code to operate these systems, but AI will soon generate the code, and engineers will only need to review it.

“These functions, once implemented on site, are expected to reduce programming and repetitive documentation work, boosting productivity by more than 30 percent and allowing engineers to focus on more creative and high value-added tasks,” Posco said.

Through this partnership, Posco also hopes to take a step closer to realizing its core goal for this year — establishing an intelligent factory. An intelligent factory is a next-generation production system that combines industrial AI and robotics.

Translated from the JoongAng Ilbo using generative AI and edited by Korea JoongAng Daily staff. BY YI WOO-LIM [yoon.soyeon@joongang.co.kr]