At World AI Conference 2018, Jack Ma, the co-founder and chairman of $414 billion e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba, stated that artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and Internet of Things (IoT) can all become meaningless if they fail to target the manufacturing industry.
“AI, Blockchain and IoT will be meaningless tech unless they can promote the transformation of the manufacturing industry, and the evolution of the society towards a greener and more inclusive direction,” Ma said.
The speech Ma provided at World AI Conference was not exclusive to blockchain technology but rather three technologies which most major conglomerates and governments consider to be the building blocks of the fourth industrial revolution.
The manufacturing industry of China alone is valued at around $3.1 trillion, with the US and other major economies operating multi-trillion dollar manufacturing sectors as well.
Over the past decade, especially in the past three years, the industry of smart manufacturing has grown exponentially, as conglomerates have begun to explore various innovative ways to cut back costs and improve the efficiency of the manufacturing process with emerging technologies.
As such, the manufacturing process of most hardware and machineries have drastically changed in recent years, with companies moving towards automation and the usage of robotics to eliminate manual errors and speed up existing operations.
Since the emergence of the concept of applying decentralized systems to a variety of industries in early 2016, many blockchain consortia and development firms have established their focus on utilizing the blockchain to rebuild supply chains.