How GlobalFoundries Tames AI For Real Gains
3. AI Agents For Maintenance Technicians
GlobalFoundries will soon roll out a pilot test for another AI-based tool. GF partnered with Lavorro, a company that develops AI and ML solutions for the semiconductor manufacturing industry, to create a new AI-based system for machine troubleshooting.
“Once a tool gets an alarm or an error, the time taken to recover varies,” says Singh. “Why does it vary? We have technicians with different experience. There are some that are really very, very good, that have seen the problem. They’ve worked with us for 20 years. They know exactly when they see the problem. They know exactly what to do.”
New technicians, on the other hand, may take much longer to make the same repair, owing to their lack of tribal knowledge. GlobalFoundries designed the new AI-based system to address the challenge.
Using five years’ worth of legacy error logs that include machine model numbers and error codes, GF trained an AI model to assist technicians with machine repairs. When a technician enters a model and error code, the AI provides the highest probability root cause and the correct fix, based on the historical error log data.
“It’s a living tool … every fix is going to be logged in,” says Singh. “The idea is that the database continues to grow and the answers, the refinement of the answers, become better and better, so you basically have more accurate flow into [the database].
“It’s going to take us a couple of years to actually get the full benefit out of it, but when it does … we expect that it’s going to give us at least two points of productive time and save a lot of money from changing parts and all that.”
Marrying modern, advanced AI with dependable machine learning algorithms is another logical next step for the technology. Taking that error data and turning it into an agentic AI companion for technicians feels like a no-artificial-brainer.
