This week has seen the US and UK pull out of signing the international Artificial Intelligence (AI) Declaration. In the UK's case, it is because of fears over international security, and for the US, there is a belief that such an agreement would kill off this young transformative industry. However, one thing is certain, AI has a significant future in the cement sector, and its true value and potential is still being discovered.
AI as a sales tool
Cement producers are looking at a multitude of ways in which AI can make a difference to their sales operations. McKinsey recently spoke with Juan Beltrán, digital manager of global sales excellence at Holcim, about new uses for AI. The multinational has been piloting Gen AI for customer sales in Spain to order cement trucks via WhatsApp. While the technology is not yet perfected, the benefits show that it is worth persisting with its development.
Mr Beltrán admitted that during testing “Sometimes our Gen-A-enabled tool could be too chatty, or overexplain things. Or even recommend products that weren’t part of our product portfolio. At present, “The large language model (LLM) may not handle certain queries effectively. That’s why we always offer customers the option to interact with a human agent,” he added.
Cemex is also exploring how AI can support customer services in a more sophisticated way. The company has copiloted Technical Xpert, an AI assistant running on Microsoft Azure OpenAI with GPT 4.0 that uses Teams as a chat interface. The idea is that the sales force in the field can access AI to recommend the best sustainable product for customers from Cemex’s vast range of products. The tool was recently launched in Mexico with game-changing results.
“This new tool is sending us information much faster, so we can have the conversations with customers and at the same time asking, internally, technical questions: what can I offer this customer based on what he’s requiring from me?” explained Christian Alday, a Cemex commercial advisor in La Paz, California. “For me, reaching this type of information in the past would take me to knock at least on four people’s doors and the response time would have been maybe, I don’t know, in an hour.”
Plant and decarbonisation solutions with AI
At the plant level, there is clear evidence that AI can make CO2 reductions. Leading AI solution providers are trying to get ahead in providing the best services. ABB and Carbon Re are collaborating to enhance their offerings by working together. In October 2024 at Cemtech Europe, the two companies announced that they would jointly explore a go-to-market solution for the cement industry uniting ABB’s suites with Carbon Re’s AI and machine learning expertise.
A cement plant in Czechia will integrate Carbon Re’s AI platform on top of ABB’s Ability™ Expert Optimizer for cement APC solution. A key challenge will be energy reduction in the process and Carbon Re’s technology is attempting to reduce energy consumption of the kiln by 5-20 per cent, in real-time, without intervention from the control room operator.
The extent to which AI can be used as a decarbonisation tool is not fully known yet, and new frontiers are being broken every day. German-based alcemy is implementing AI in the cement and concrete industries. Alcemy’s AI platform has been instrumental in efforts by Spenner cement in Germany to develop a new generation of low clinker cements, capable of delivering emissions reductions of up to 65 per cent. The company is now acquiring international customers and will start its US activities by deploying its AI-powered quality control software at a Titan Cement plant in Florida.
Titan is also investigating AI-driven improvements across its operations. At its Patras plant in Greece it has been trialling cement bag inspections – a task previously performed by human inspectors on eight-hour shifts, 24 hours a day, in harsh conditions. In the past, when defects were detected, the plant was always manually shut down to remove the defective bags.
To address this challenge, Irida Labs of Greece developed an automated inspection system that can check cement bags on the production line using Basler cameras of Germany protected in IP67-rated housings. Hardwired to computers via an ADLink, Irida Lab’s vision AI inspection modules on the PerCV.ai platform provides specific AI algorithms for real-time defect detection.
Summary
AI is revolutionising the cement industry, transforming every activity from manufacturing, to sales and distribution. The race to develop the best and most intuitive AI systems is accelerating, and AI is fast becoming indispensible in the fight against climate change by enabling innovative and highly effective approaches to low carbon cement production.
