In 2017, my team and I embarked on a programme to accelerate digital innovation to support capabilities across every area of the Rolls-Royce business. Our ambition was to achieve our environmental and economic targets more efficiently and effectively by harnessing the power of data, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning.
Five years later, we’re not only leading technological innovation within the industry and achieving key net zero targets. We’ve also unlocked more than £400 million in value and have developed an expert team of data scientists.
On March 31st, 2022, we’re bringing all this experience together to launch R2 Factory. It will bring the opportunity presented by artificial intelligence to other physical, complex, and highly regulated industries.
We want to build a safe space to do hard things and we are welcoming members into it. Through our work here at Rolls-Royce, we’ve proven that we can achieve our innovation goals quickly and with less risk by unlocking the value of data. But we know that these goals can only be achieved through collaboration.
While data, AI and machine learning can help to predict, control, and manage these processes, gaps in human intelligence mean that machine intelligence is still immature.
At R2 Factory, we want to co-create AI solutions for the hardest challenges faced by old-world industry. Having successfully embedded the digital transformation at Rolls-Royce, we hope that we can now bring these capabilities to domains that are tightly constrained and difficult to access. Partners and customers will be able to navigate the space and develop an understanding of what it’s like to work alongside a leading industrial company.
To arrive at solutions that work in the most demanding environments, we combine these learnings with deep domain knowledge and system engineering expertise. Alongside this, we don’t just offer solutions. By embedding our teams within our members’ organisations, we can implement the cultural mindset and upskilling to enable the most value from their digital strategy.
We hope that this space creates an extraordinary opportunity for businesses to come together and work deliberately on making the world a better place for the next 100 years than they made it over the last 100 years.
We’re on a mission to improve the world we live in through the combination of new approaches to collaborative innovation and the augmentation of human intelligence with artificial intelligence.
And everyone’s welcome.