Business Situation
SUEZ is a French water and waste management group and the world's leading private water supplier. To optimise its activities and increase efficiency, the company initiated a data transformation project with the following goals:
- Democratise the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the company by promoting use cases and achievements
- Foster collaboration between data scientists and AI stakeholders
- Enable AI developments on a unified, service-based technology platform
- Empower the deployment of AI models in the field, particularly in an industrial context
Solution
With these goals in mind, SUEZ developed the CoDAI (Collaborative Data & Artificial Intelligence) platform with the help of Avanade and Microsoft. This portal catalogues AI projects and algorithms, allowing users, such as program managers, to find and test existing solutions.
The CoDAI platform is backed by Microsoft Azure machine learning and Azure DevOps. It enables the automatic creation of work environments for data scientists, with space for data, code, experimentation, training and the deployment of machine learning models.
The platform now extends to industrial IoT (IIoT) applications, with an "edge deployment” of AI algorithms, facility device management, and feedback loops for data scientists to allow them to monitor and improve models. For example, an AI model has been developed to conduct industrial inspections directly on SUEZ sites. The algorithm is deployed in the facility using IoT and feeds data into CoDAI's data lake. Additionally, the CoDAI platform also enables new services and features, such as the ability to optimise AI algorithms to run on low-power IIoT devices.
Results
The CoDAI platform makes it possible to reduce the time-to-market needed to deploy an AI model in production, making it ready for use in a project. Within a year of being commissioned, the platform hosted roughly 40 projects, three of which have been fully put into production.
Avanade is proud to support SUEZ in the development of CoDAI and apply our expertise in development, AI and IoT throughout the platform’s evolution.
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