With Augmented Intelligence Tata Steel promise to deliver within 72 Hours.

The 118 years old company, Tata Steel’s, investments in digital frameworks and AI over the years have kept the company at the frontier of new technologies and are paying rich dividends in areas of productivity and savings. The company plans to use technology in accelerating steel delivery — from weeks to days.

The 72 hours delivery commitment was reaffirmed by the Chief Information Officer (CIO) Jayanta Banerjee who said, “We are now trying to become the Zepto, Zomato or Blinkit of the world. Being a steel company, I will not be able to deliver steel to you in 10 minutes, but I can deliver steel to you in 72 hours. Tata Steel is well-positioned to meet its lofty goals: it has a crude steel capacity of 35 million tons per annum with plants spread across India, the UK, the Netherlands, and Thailand. It has around 169 companies under its network”.

Tata Steel’s digital platforms have helped it sell products online. Additionally, by mapping its entire operations spread over multiple sites with many different functions, the company gains better visibility on how it can serve customers better once an order is placed. Its digital journey, which began over eight years ago, has now resulted in the company building 600 AI tools with collected data close to 11.2 petabytes.

“Tata Steel has been a company that is a leader in steel, but also has been an early adopter of technology, whether it’s a steel technology or digital”, says Banerjee. According to the CIO of Tata Steel, the company has been in the forefront of getting accreditation from several global organisations such as World Economic Forum Lighthouse, which he described as the epitome of digital transformation accreditation. The certificate covers around 80-82% of the steel production. Besides, Tata Steel also goes through the frameworks of Gartner and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for accreditation, which are also tough benchmarks to achieve. The company is associated with MIT in the AI segment. According to Banerjee, Tata Steel laid out a formal technology roadmap in 2018 with two key goals: one to become a global leader in the steel industry by 2025, leveraging digital technologies and the second was to generate at least $2 billion in potential savings through digital technologies. The savings were achieved in 2025.

Over the years, Tata Steel has built around 600 AI models which are being deployed across various functions of the company. Around 80% of them are used in its manufacturing division: from helping production to safety. For example, Tata Steel uses an AI imaging model to determine if there are any defects in any manufacturing process. Among other things, the models also check for the moisture content of the procured coal. The company also uses tech to ensure employee safety. Tata Steel can now remotely monitor through an algorithm whether the correct safety steps are being followed by its workers. The company says its investments in digital processes ultimately benefit the end user. According to Tata Steel, it doesn’t just supply the raw material but also helps its users.

Now, Tata Steel is working on the modalities in leveraging AI and GenAI. These addresses the possibilities in reducing the time to deliver its products, improve the safety issues, and create new service models. “The future is in AI, and there is no doubt about it. It will transform things”, says Banerjee.

He believes GenAI will be able to create new content and also analyse a larger volume of data to generate insights. “The next form of agentic AI is humanoid where there is a robotic operating system that takes command from a natural language”.

Advancements in AI have also led to fears about job cuts and unemployment. Banerjee believes that one cannot blindly implement the existing template of productivity or efficiency in manufacturing, as he believes that these are designed for developed Western economies where there is a scarcity of labour. This is not the case in India. “We have to be responsible as a society, as a company. So here we will use technology as a co-pilot. Where robots can help a human, then I will use it as a co-pilot, he remarks. The digital journey has started to pay rich dividends for Tata Steel not just in monetary or productivity terms. Due to our digital interface, we are able to attract more customers from different demographics”.

Team Maverick