June VLS Webinar: The Next Digital Leap to AI (An Interactive Webinar)

Thanks to recent progress, breakthrough results, and demonstrations of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in products and services already in wide use, there’s a lot of speculation that AI may usher in radical – arguably unprecedented – changes in the way people live and work. However, AI is not a single technology but a family of digital tools and techniques, e.g., computer vision, natural language, virtual assistants, robotic process automation, and advanced machine learning.

Chemical companies are using these tools to varying degrees. Some are taking an opportunistic approach, testing only one technology and piloting it in a specific function. Others are much bolder, adopting all five and then absorbing them across their entire organization.

This presentation will be interactive.  Attendees at the primary meeting will guide the discussion and attendee input about artificial intelligence and what it means for chemical engineers will be captured at all three meetings.  In addition, attendees at all three meetings will be able to share their favorite ideas with other attendees.  You may want to prepare ahead of time by reading Venkat Venkatasubramanian’s open access AIChE Journal article titled “The promise of artificial intelligence in chemical engineering: Is it here, finally?”

Dr. Sam G. Samdani is a senior industry expert in the Global Chemicals & Agriculture Practice at McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm. His responsibilities include providing thought leadership across a range of complex knowledge domains in advanced/engineered materials, pharmaceutical ingredients and specialty chemicals for the top management of many multinational chemical, pharmaceutical and petroleum companies as well as government agencies and NGOs worldwide. He also helps clients improve their strategic decision-making processes by overcoming the all-too-human cognitive biases (e.g., executive overconfidence, extreme loss aversion, and hostility to algorithms) with behavioral countermeasures (e.g., taking the outside view, and conducting decision pre-mortems).

Based in Summit, New Jersey, he enjoys the privilege of working with clients to accelerate their digital transformation by deploying advanced analytics and AI tools to help solve their toughest problems faster and unlock opportunities by improving their operating models. He has co-authored a book, Going Digital: Realizing the Dreams of a Digital Bangladesh for All, where he shares country-level strategies and stories from “where the future has already happened” to help catapult developing countries like Bangladesh from old-style agriculture and industrialization to the emerging new era of digitization and virtualization.

Prior to joining McKinsey, Sam worked at McGraw-Hill as an Associate Editor with Chemical Engineering, a monthly technical publication, covering advances in technologies and developments in regulatory affairs. He also edited two books – Safety and Risk Management Tools and Techniques in the Chemical Process Industries (CPI), and Heat Transfer Technologies and Practices for Effective Energy Management – published by McGraw-Hill. He received his BS in chemical engineering from Yale University, and his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Rochester. He also completed a graduate program in business journalism at Columbia University.