Hexagon AB, a world chief in digital actuality options like digital twins, GNSS, and LiDAR, continues to make strides in advancing R&D and agentic AI. Curiously, the Stockholm-based firm attributes loads of this R&D to its Hyderabad international functionality centre (GCC), which serves as an AI hub for the corporate.
As Hexagon’s first and oldest GCC, Hyderabad stands as one of many firm’s largest R&D centres worldwide, with round 1,200 staff. Burkhard Boeckem, CTO at Hexagon AB, just lately visited the Hyderabad GCC in the course of the firm’s Tech Day occasion.
Reflecting on the importance of the centre, Boeckem informed AIM that Hyderabad is one in every of Hexagon’s three fundamental R&D centres globally, apart from Switzerland and the US. “The main target right here is totally on R&D, with some service capabilities intently aligned to our innovation initiatives,” Boeckem stated.
Navaneet Mishra, who heads the corporate’s Hyderabad GCC, had in depth expertise working with AI at SAP and Infosys earlier than becoming a member of Hexagon.
The centre fosters sturdy collaborations with expertise giants like AWS and Microsoft, in addition to native and international academia. “The partnerships we’ve got constructed listed below are instrumental in driving innovation. We invited our companions to the Tech Day, and it’s evident that 2025 would be the 12 months of brokers in AI,” Boeckem remarked.
The Future is All About Agentic AI
Hexagon’s method to AI has been strategic and evolutionary. Boeckem stated that from the early adoption of deep studying in 2012 to embracing generative AI in 2018, the corporate has persistently been forward of business developments.
“Our work revolves round taking real-world knowledge and creating digital twins with metrology-grade accuracy, leveraging machine studying, deep studying, and generative AI to realize insights and actionable intelligence,” he stated.
Boeckem defined that the analysis crew, which relies in Hyderabad, facilitates a lot of this work.
The identical is true for agentic AI. Boeckem stated that these techniques, which may autonomously make choices and work together with their surroundings, are poised to rework industries.
“Hexagon’s tagline, ‘Empowering an Autonomous and Sustainable Future,’ aligns completely with agentic AI,” Boeckem stated that whether or not it’s an autonomous flying laser scanner or off-road autonomy in mining, Hexagon’s focus is on rising autonomy in decision-making.
Hexagon’s R&D efforts span 28 industries, with divisions devoted to geosystems, manufacturing intelligence, asset lifecycle intelligence, security infrastructure, and autonomous options. The Hyderabad GCC performs a pivotal position in these domains by housing the innovation hub—a 400-strong crew centered on this innovation.
“The expertise pool right here [in Hyderabad] is phenomenal, and we’re enthusiastic about the way forward for agentic AI and its potential to rework industries,” Boeckem stated, including that the corporate spends half of its income again into R&D, Hyderabad being one of many largest centres for it.
AI on the Edge and within the Proper Locations
Hexagon’s focus is on bringing agentic AI into the engineering, mining, and building operations as an alternative of specializing in vehicles and driving, which Boeckem calls manufacturing intelligence. “Let the Bosch and Continentals of the world take it and produce it to scalability, Hexagon is concentrated on course of optimisation and inspection automation.”
Boeckem stated that autonomous autos are one thing that the corporate focuses on, however in industrial use circumstances as an alternative of on-road driving.
The corporate collaborates with answer suppliers like Boston Dynamics and Airbus to create merchandise that remedy issues. For instance, Hexagon created the BLK2FLY with Boston Dynamics, which gained the Time Innovation of the Yr award in 2022. It has superb impediment avoidance and monitoring capabilities.
A key focus space for Hexagon is AI on the edge, enabling real-time knowledge processing and insights on the gadget degree. Boeckem highlighted the Aura face scanner, a product developed with vital contributions from the Hyderabad crew.
Aura reconstructs a 3D digital twin of the face in milliseconds, providing purposes in dermatology, cosmetic surgery, and medical aesthetics. The scanner leverages AI on the edge to supply unparalleled insights with precision.
With its modern system that resembles a glossy, golden monitor, Aura is far more than only a show — it homes 13 cameras together with a complicated illumination system. This expertise can reconstruct a extremely detailed digital twin of your face in a millisecond.
It allows them to analyse facial options in 3D, providing insights into a variety of considerations, from assessing UV injury and brown spots to evaluating pore circumstances. It additionally permits them to simulate the potential results of beauty procedures, comparable to Botox injections or facelifts, offering a transparent visualisation of the anticipated outcomes.
Moreover, using AI on the edge, significantly agentic AI, is a crucial facet to contemplate. As agentic AI turns into extra prevalent, there’s a rising give attention to moral and regulatory concerns. Making certain that these techniques function safely and pretty is essential, particularly when it comes to privateness safety—comparable to when utilizing facial scanning expertise.
Regardless of this perception in agentic AI, Boeckem can also be a agency believer in teamwork and doesn’t utterly agree that there could be firms that work with simply AI brokers. “The inspiring and motivating issues we’re doing at Hexagon India… can’t be changed by AI brokers. Essentially the most profitable firms discover the suitable stability between human ingenuity and AI,” Boeckem stated, including that Jensen Huang’s concept of the long run about bodily AI is totally true.
He believes that although humanoids won’t be in folks’s properties, we would see them in harmful and life-threatening locations for people. “By 2026, we’d have in all probability exhausted all the probabilities of a immediate and supply of a giant language mannequin. I believe then it’d be time to maneuver on to the subsequent chapter.”
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