▶ 0:16:49>> this hearing will come to order. Thank you for being here. I recognize myself opening remarks and thank you, ranking member baldwin for working to put this together. Artificial intelligence will usher in significant improvements for quality of life of the american people. It will make many workplaces safer and more productive, helping increase output, raise wages and grow the economy.
▶ 0:17:22It will enhance manufacturing capabilities, especially those of critical importance for the economic and national security such as semiconductors and those in the defense industrial base. It will make it easier to reshore manufacturing three human enhancing automation and digital simulation. Smart systems and devices have potential to revolutionize health care, improving early detection of diseases such as cancer and helping people with disabilities live better lives.
▶ 0:17:52Not by replacing doctors, but by augmenting the diagnostic and treatment capabilities. Ai enabled research enabled by cloud labs can lower discovery -- the barrier to discovery for new drugs. It presents unique opportunities to save lives. I have noted that as I traveled the state some north carolinians share concerns about the growth of ai and automated or autonomous technology.
▶ 0:18:24There is a natural hesitancy towards technology that may disrupt income at industries or systems. This normal to worry about the impacts of advancements on your job, your children and your community. If we have learned anything from our history, innovation is the lifeblood of the american economy. Our nation's story has been shaped by technological advancements that have time and time again expanded prosperity and improved outcomes.
▶ 0:18:52I believe ai deployed in numerous and ingenious ways can help people be better versions of themselves in their daily lives. For those of us in this room it is our job to listen to those concerns and work together in a bipartisan fashion to address potential harms so our nation can reap the tremendous benefits ai has to offer. As I have said before, winning the ai race is paramount for our national and economic security.
▶ 0:19:22The administration is leaning in and providing important leadership. The ongoing work to first identify and aid in the export of the american ai stack will ensure that global ai diffusion and standards are anchored in american values. The genesis mission will build upon america's scientific dominance by networking together world-class labs, computing power and data sets to turbocharge scientific discovery.
▶ 0:19:52The diffusion into the economy will be a critical dimension in the race. According to one report, ai is the most rapidly adopted general-purpose technology in history with three in five U.S. adults surveyed having used ai less than three years after its release. However, other studies have found U.S. businesses can lag their asian and even european peers and enterprise adoption of ai tools.
▶ 0:20:20I'm concerned that china given its top-down command-and-control structure, deep and sophisticated manufacturing industry, and open-source heavy ai ecosystem is in a prime position. Achieving a manufacturing renaissance in america is at bipartisan and deeply held a goal as any in congress.
▶ 0:20:46Given demographic realities such as an aging skilled workforce and stalled population growth, we will need to defuse and scale smart technologies processes to make more critical goods domestically. I'm excited to discuss many technologies and systems today. Our witnesses are at the front lines in cutting edge of making our economy and daily lives smarter.
▶ 0:21:10I look forward to hearing from them about what excites them, what concerns them and roadblocks we in congress can address. Ranking member. Do you have any comments? >> thank you, Mr. chairman, and thank you to the witnesses appearing today.
▶ 0:21:29Given the focus of today's hearing I wanted to begin by raising the troubling news from last week regarding the trumpet administration actions -- actions to force artificial intelligence companies to deploy systems without guardrails and safety measures. Anthropic refused to have their technology used for mass surveillance of americans or for the deployment of autonomous weapons without human oversight.
▶ 0:21:58The trump administration then labeled anthropic as a security risk and secretary hegseth has taken the unprecedented step to blacklist the company. Our witnesses are here to testify about how artificial intelligence can be used to improve worker safety and efficiency. We cannot ignore the stakes at play here. Workers and consumers alike are rightfully worried about the deployment of ai systems.
▶ 0:22:29A study done by stanford last year found 45 percent of workers expressed concerns about the accuracy and reliability of ai systems. 23% fear job displacement and 16% worried about the lack of human oversight built into the systems. That does not begin to touch on the concerns regarding privacy, intellectual property and energy use that comes along with ai.
▶ 0:23:01If designed with workers at the table and during all stages, the research and development to deployment to negotiating guardrails with employers. Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve productivity, reduce safety risks and ease burnout in the workplace. The best innovations come from the factory floor.
▶ 0:23:24The people actually doing the work know better with the needs, inefficiencies and liabilities are day-to-day. I look forward to hearing our witnesses today and thank you for being here. >> I think the ranking member. I would like to introduce our witnesses for today. Our first witness is demetri -- help me on this. Pronounce your last name. .
▶ 0:23:53I even have a phonetic spelling. Mr. giannikopoulos is the chief innovation officer at rad ai, using ai to help radiologists, allowing them to spend more time on patient care. His experience applying new technologies to health care spans over two decades. Our second witness is brittany ng. Ms. ng's vice president at siemens.
▶ 0:24:25She has extensive expertise in the deployment of ai across manufacturing context. The third witness is damion shelton. Mr. shelton is cofounder and chairman of the board of agility robotics. He has almost two decades of experience in academia, innovation and business. Mr. shelton founded two highly successful robotic companies.
▶ 0:24:50The final witness is mark morrow, senior fellow at the metropolitan policy program at the brookings institution. His research focuses on how technology development plays out differently across regions. All right. Mr. giannikopoulos, you will recognize.
▶ 0:25:17Mr. Giannikopoulos: Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I come before you has a health care ai expert. As a caregiver I have supported my wife to cancer. I have more than a decade of front light care experience. As a patient I have lived with multiple sclerosis for more than two decades. These experiences have shaped to eye and why am here today. They have fueled my 20-year career in health care.
▶ 0:25:47Mr. Giannikopoulos: They have give me a first-hand view of how care is delivered, decisions are made and what happens when the system works and when it doesn't. You each of these roles I have seen the same reality. Outcomes hinge on whether a diagnosis is made quickly and accurately. In health care the most dangerous failure is not the machine failure. It is a missed or delayed diagnosis. Research estimates of the 800,000 americans each year die or are permanently disabled because a diagnostic error.
▶ 0:26:15Mr. Giannikopoulos: Extensive research shows that errors often occur because clinicians are operating within an increasingly complex and strained health care system, managing rising volumes, time pressures and expanding information. Imagine a patient arriving in your community emergency department with sudden chest pain. A ct is performed. The cause is something rare but deadly, aortic dissection. Without rapid diagnosis and treatment, a quarter of patients can die within 48 hours.
▶ 0:26:45Mr. Giannikopoulos: Today ai is helping at multiple points in the patient care. Within minutes ai can analyze the images and help flag the findings so it is reviewed immediately. When the radiologist opens the case, ai can integrate trusted clinical guidance into the workflow. It does not replace the physician. It strengthens confidence and trust in the diagnosis. Once a diagnosis is made, the care team must act quickly.
▶ 0:27:15Mr. Giannikopoulos: The patient may need to be transferred for surgery. Ai can help ensure the diagnosis is clearly communicated and shared across care teams so treatment can begin without delay. That is productivity, coordinate care. Research public flesh of the -- published by the american heart association says it reduces delays and improves survival. We see the same reality and stroke care where every minute of delay with his permanent death of millions of brain cells controlling vital functions to the body.
▶ 0:27:46Mr. Giannikopoulos: A faster diagnosis can mean survival and less disability. The story does not in their. The same scan they reveal a quiet lung mass. Something those who followed carefully. Ai can help ensure follow-up imaging is scheduled, care teams alerted and patients do not fall through the cracks months or years later. Unfortunately over half of the patients never receive the follow-up care there conditions require. For those americans the risk is not theoretical. It becomes reality.
▶ 0:28:16Mr. Giannikopoulos: This is not just about efficiency. It is about trust. We are asking clinicians to manage rising imaging volumes, expanding documentation requirements an increasingly complex patient needs while the health care workforce is shrinking and burnout remains high. Ai, when implementers responsibility is not replacing clinicians. It is acting as a pressure release valve helping reduce cognitive burden and supporting clinicians and delivering safe and timely care.
▶ 0:28:45Mr. Giannikopoulos: I have deployed both fda cleared ai tools and other clinical software that does not require fda clearance. In both cases the systems undergo extensive clinical, privacy and government reviews before deployment. Definitions -- physicians remain responsible and tools operate within existing laws and professional accountability frameworks.
▶ 0:29:06Mr. Giannikopoulos: Based on my experience deploying the systems nationwide, the most important determinant of safety is not only how they are evaluated before the appointme -- deployment but how they are supported in clinical use. This is where consistent national standards are essential. This is important for rural and underserved communities where access to expertise may be limited.
▶ 0:29:31Mr. Giannikopoulos: Ai can help extend the reach of clinical expertise and support clinicians caring for patients regardless of geography and access to local resources. Ai's most powerful not what it replaces human judgment, but when it strengthens it. Ai will not replace physicians. It will help to do with a train their entire lives to do, care for patients. Less hype, more help. That is not a future promise. That is happening today.
▶ 0:29:57Mr. Giannikopoulos: Behind every scan is a person, a family and a moment forgetting the diagnosis right can change everything. Thankful thankf you. I look forward to your questions.
▶ 0:30:08Chair Budd: Ms. ng, who are recognized for five minutes.
▶ 0:30:12Ms. Brittany Ng: Good morning, chairman, ranking member and members of the subcommittee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. United states does not need ai as an abstract capability. Our global competitiveness requires ai deployed on factory floors, shipyards and across production systems where it generates measurable productivity gains. I am proud to take on this challenge.
▶ 0:30:40Ms. Brittany Ng: I lead siemens maritime business where we work hand-in-hand with shipyards and manufacturers. At siemens, we are a global leader in industrial ai. Last year we invested $15 billion in the united states to further our leadership in this transformational technology.
▶ 0:31:04Ms. Brittany Ng: We are continuing to bring industrial ai to customers and seen firsthand how ai is most powerful when it connects data to operational decisions in the real world. Through our maritime work shipbuilders are using our physics-based ai enabled digital shipbuilding platform to connect design, simulation and production planning so that teams can identify bottlenecks before they occur.
▶ 0:31:38Ms. Brittany Ng: They can reduce rework, improve first time quality, and compressed production timelines. By training ai in virtual environments shipyards can improve planning and performance even in complex production conditions. Industrial ai, alongside digital twins and software defined automation is transforming manufacturing across industries.
▶ 0:32:02Ms. Brittany Ng: We are seeing machine downtime reduced by 50%, energy consumption cut by 20%, and quality control with 99.9% accuracy. Industrial ai is helping manufacturers to achieve up to 40% in productivity improvements. It is transforming traditional factories into flexible digital enterprises.
▶ 0:32:32Ms. Brittany Ng: In modern shipbuilding innovation looks like being able to create a full digital twin of a vessel before steel is cut. This means our customers can simulate how the ship will be built, how systems will integrate and how production will flow through the yard in a virtual environment.
▶ 0:32:54Ms. Brittany Ng: On the deck plate industrial ai can help sequence work packages, flag quality issues earlier, predict equipment downtime, and optimize the flow of material. The cruise deploying these technologies are spending less time waiting and doing rework and more time building -- crews. When these tools are broadly adopted they become economic multipliers.
▶ 0:33:23Ms. Brittany Ng: However, technology does not just transform industry unless that people understand it, trust it and see how it improves their lives. At siemens, we have learned digital transformation works best when the worker is at the center. Manufacturing today faces a shortage of 400,000 open jobs nationwide. The issue is not ai coming for industrial jobs.
▶ 0:33:51Ms. Brittany Ng: It is a shortage of skilled workers amid increasing production complexity. Industrial ai does not just solve the workforce shortage. It changes the entire equation. These technologies reduce repetitive and hazardous tasks while elevating the skill sets of american workers. As congress considers ai and manufacturing policy, I respectfully offer three considerations.
▶ 0:34:22Ms. Brittany Ng: First, distinguished industrial ai from consumer ai. Industrial ai operates in structured, safety critical business-to-business environments with validated data and rigorous testing. Second, focus on adoption. Federal policies and investments should integrate digital modernization from the outset and accelerate deployment through public-private collaboration.
▶ 0:34:46Ms. Brittany Ng: Programs like manufacturing usa and the doe's genesis mission provide that bridge,, moving from innovation to real-world production. Lastly, the government should send a clear and consistent signal that digital capability is core industrial infrastructure. America's competitive edge will be determined by who most effectively deploys ai. In the physical world our nation is indisputably the world's greatest innovation leader.
▶ 0:35:14Ms. Brittany Ng: Our challenge is scaling advanced technologies through the industrial base. Thank you and I look forward to your questions.
▶ 0:35:21Chair Budd: Dr. shelton, you are recognized for five minutes.
▶ 0:35:25Dr. Shelton: Thank you, chairman budd and ranking member ballman for letting me speak today. I would like to open with a quote from peter pan. "all of this has happened before and it will happen again." united states first started collecting census data in 1820, stay exactly 200 years before agility robotics launched his humanoid robot. The vast majority of americans worked on farms using simple tools and assisted by animals.
▶ 0:35:53Dr. Shelton: Over the next 200 years, agricultural employment shrank to 2% of the workforce. This is not a story of decline. Absolute employment, the total number of americans working has increased by about 30% since the 1820's. Why? Technology. In the 50 years after the patenting of the karmic reaper in 1834, nearly 12,000 additional farm implement patents were filed in the U.S.
▶ 0:36:21Dr. Shelton: Far from destroying jobs, automation and agriculture expanded direct agricultural employment and unlocked truly staggering growth in the united states. The modern ai robotics boom promises to bring the sorts of transformative changes to the rest of our economy. Agility robotics started in 2015 is a spinoff from oregon state university, from the darpa funded academic groups who have grown to more than 300 employees in oregon, pennsylvania and california.
▶ 0:36:53Dr. Shelton: Our oregon facility co. Locates our r&d teams and factory robofab where we assembled 100% of robots in the U.S.. Our humanoid robot digit was launched in 2020 is the first full-size humanoid robot available for purchase. Our customers include warehouse and logistic works, amazon and manufacturing and automotive suppliers scheffler and toyota. With the theme of providing a solution for repetitive handling alongside human coworkers.
▶ 0:37:22Dr. Shelton: I would like to address the impact of automation on jobs and human workers. Many manual labor jobs are facing pressure from the aging workforce, high turnover and a high injury rate which is where agility has focused its deployment. The bureau of labor statistics projects vacancies of one million physicians in warehouse work. Each robot deployed here not only does not take a job from a human, it enables the business to grow and expand overall hiring elsewhere.
▶ 0:37:51Dr. Shelton: The site an example from agility partner, in 2012, amazon employed 88,000 people and acquire the robotics startup. In the next 13 years they hired an additional 1.4 million people. Prior to the modern ai boom it took engineers must to develop a new application for a robot.
▶ 0:38:11Dr. Shelton: Modern ai can shorten the time of deployment for small and medium businesses that desperately need to solve labor challenges but lack the technical and financial resources. As we have seen from self-driving vehicles, safety often lags behind technical ability. It's important the robots do not endanger human colleagues, the public or the homes and workplaces. Focusing first on controlled environment.
▶ 0:38:41Dr. Shelton: Gaining experience in these environments first with a focus on continuous safety improvement and industrial best practices is the fastest and most responsible path for a successful long-term buildout for a successful long-term buildout for general-purpose automation. We owe the general public a solid safety argument back to my data. I will conclude by addressing the challenges posed by china's extremely rapid progress in humanoid robots. To be blunt, they are doing a good job. The technology is well-designed, highly capable and backed by a formidable supply chain.
▶ 0:39:10Dr. Shelton: A few recent papers by security researchers identified a vulnerability in a chinese humanoid robot allowing for remote takeover and a phone home data logging mechanism that sends data to a remote server. As of this week, and I did check before appearing, that robot is available for sale in the U.S. for less than $20,000.
▶ 0:39:32Dr. Shelton: Combined with open source and open way models, china is creating compelling value proposition for early adopters internal purpose humanoid robots -- in general purpose humanoid robots. Thank you again for the opportunity to speak and I thank the committee leadership on these issues, including the regulatory sandbox approach. The agility robots is ready to expand the economy ensure competitiveness and economic security as we move into the next industrial revolution.
▶ 0:40:06Chair Budd: Thank you, Dr. shelton. Mr. morrow, will recognize for five minutes.
▶ 0:40:09Mr. Morrow: Thanks so much and to the same with members of the committee. We want to thank you for the opportunity to comment. I will say my remarks here are my personal views. Separate from the brookings institution. I want to start by reaffirming the basic premise here that I think is very compelling.
▶ 0:40:35Mr. Morrow: America's innovators are day by day introducing incredible new tools and solutions that are allowing more and more people, firms and entrepreneurs to expand and reach -- the reach and of human expertise. It is a compelling moment and that is creating in the country significant excitement. Yet the degree of pessimism complicates this moment. We should be frank and the committee has been frank about that.
▶ 0:41:05Mr. Morrow: Some worry that technology will not be smoothly adopted. Adoption will be challenging. Others feel the greatest automation technology in history. Others worry about safety questions and which skills will serve them in the future to enable this work.
▶ 0:41:25Mr. Morrow: I want to say a few words about areas where federal support can maintain the sector's momentum, reinforce its value and promote optimism about its possibilities. My fennel panels have done an excellent job of inspiring confidence by detailing some of the possibilities. I want to touch on a few ways my written testimony suggested we consisting ai success.
▶ 0:41:57Mr. Morrow: Broader ai innovation and adoption like we are seeing requires maintaining a dominant research base, abundant research flows generate talent but also the ideas, intellectual property, innovation and start us we are hearing about -- startups we are hearing about. The nation remains -- does retain clear global leadership.
▶ 0:42:22Mr. Morrow: With that said, it has fallen short of the doubling of ai research that had been suggested in 2019 by the national security commission on artificial intelligence, an important bipartisan watchword. Beyond that, to address the scale issue, the nation should prioritize a step change in total ai r&d.
▶ 0:42:50Mr. Morrow: At the same time as seeking to rejuvenate the ai research institute's program for accelerating research on new topics, establishing a test bed program involving federal research units, private sector and even data centers that can be brought into this, and direct grantmaking towards investments and what some of us call pro-worker ai that supports such values as education systems, health, human learning and human decision.
▶ 0:43:23Mr. Morrow: Accelerating adoption requires promoting the growth of emerging ai clusters in geographic regions. Nvidia, openai, microsoft and anthropic have all advocated for this kind of development. Sometimes using the term economic zones to envision regional investment areas that fuels solutions with federal and state creation, small business empowerment and community level prosperity.
▶ 0:43:52Mr. Morrow: Such regional development including through linkages with local testbeds could foment a powerful surge of optimism and communities. We believe bottom-up economic innovation in regions is an important part of this work ahead of us.
▶ 0:44:15Mr. Morrow: More boldly, congress and the trump administration could build new prize competitions or challenge programs such as the tech hubs innovation engines to further develop these hub engines that have so much to give. Finally, ai adoption leadership will further hinge on ensuring adequate pools of high quality talent exists all across the country and in every sector and in every region.
▶ 0:44:44Mr. Morrow: The challenge is narrow and wide. The narrow part of the challenge is the nation posing diminishing homegrown share of the world's elite talent. Speaking of this, itif shows that while the U.S. employs a high share of elite talent, it's domestic productions has slowed. That is a worry in these to be addressed. Concerns around the broad degree of ai readiness are important.
▶ 0:45:16Mr. Morrow: Starting now, virtually all workers will need to understand ai principles, be able to understand and direct ai effectively and evaluate its outputs. Ai literacy instruction, as the department of labor, has described in recent months, will need to cultivate agility and install such human skills as judgment, teamwork, creativity and problem-solving.
▶ 0:45:44Mr. Morrow: If that is why the achieved, workers will feel optimistic about the technology. If not, I worry they won't. A supportive ai talent strategy must foster ai readiness among both elite and general populations. Immigrants and U.S. higher ed are proven talent resources.
▶ 0:46:09Mr. Morrow: Recent reforms can help the nation maintain its edge on elite talent and more important is the need to prioritize broad ai literacy. Not just at elite institutions but throughout the region.
▶ 0:46:20Chair Budd: Thank you so much. We could take a few questions for the rest of the panel. If we have additional thoughts we will come back to that when you are recognized.
▶ 0:46:32Mr. Muro: Thank you.
▶ 0:46:33Chair Budd: Thank you for your opening remarks. It has been said that the four main inputs of ai are talent, compute, energy and data. The federal government houses a tremendous amount of scientific and important data sets that could be leveraged as strategic assets in the U.S. ai leadership.
▶ 0:46:56Chair Budd: The open government data act requires data assets owned by the federal government who is sharing but not prohibited by law to be published in machine readable format. Eve each of you first three with a particular company, what would each of your company ever deploy ai -- how would that be affected by more access to data if it is ai ready and machine readable and compatible?
▶ 0:47:27Chair Budd: How would that affect each of your companies? We will start with you.
▶ 0:47:30Mr. Giannikopoulos: The access to data is a critical aspect of development for artificial intelligence. However, in health care, the ability to have validation by which you can measure the quality of your solutions that are developed by which the employer -- deployers can assess the fit is a greater challenge.
▶ 0:47:57Mr. Giannikopoulos: Having more robust access to this machine readable, translatable and health care outcomes linked data will provide opportunities to actually assess the solutions not in a vacuum but against real american data as part of that. More robust access would be a significant enabler of adoption and innovation of the new technology.
▶ 0:48:22Chair Budd: In the world of radiology, what is a specific data set you would look to make more accessible?
▶ 0:48:27Mr. Giannikopoulos: There are two key areas. The images in the reports. The reports are one piece of silent information. What happens with that? If that quiet lung mass is identified, what percentage turns into cancer? How do you understand the progression of that? Being able to access that information at scale would enable significant development.
▶ 0:48:55Chair Budd: With radiology, that would not violate patient privacy?
▶ 0:48:59Mr. Giannikopoulos: If appropriately identified, absolutely not.
▶ 0:49:03Chair Budd: Ms. ng, your thoughts for siemens industries?
▶ 0:49:10Ms. Ng: Thank you for the question. More available, highly trusted data is gold and industrially ai environments and something important to recognize is that before the ai, it comes from machines and manufacturing systems and engineering data sets within the four walls of the factory.
▶ 0:49:37Ms. Ng: The more readily available the data is in a usable format, the better the generative insights and recommendations of the industrial ai products can make.
▶ 0:49:46Chair Budd: Thank you. Dr. shelton.
▶ 0:49:50Dr. Shelton: We have to remember there are only three ways we can actually have access to data. The most expensive is generate it ourselves. You see robotics companies trying to do that today by tele-operation. The second is when the data is available on the public internet for free and this is one way that the modern ai frontier labs made rapid projects training their ella limbs -- llm's.
▶ 0:50:20Dr. Shelton: There is no description of human movement were industrial tasks you can find on the open internet. The third way is simulation and although there's been a lot of rapid progress -- I'm sure you have seen news reports on nvidia and others that have done that kind of work -- we are in the early days of that being viable for large scale training of robots. The government release is helping a couple of ways. It gives a broad look at the economy as a whole.
▶ 0:50:48Dr. Shelton: Although agility has been focused today on these internal warehouse jobs, there are broader classes of job that would pull on things like large geospatial data sets and other large public data sources that would be exciting to have access to. He gives us a broad representative of what people are doing. That's why I cited the census data as the government has a large role to play here identifying areas where there are opportunities for us to do useful work. I'm excited to be a part of that.
▶ 0:51:15Chair Budd: Do you have an example of those ideas inside the census data?
▶ 0:51:23Dr. Shelton: What's fascinating is how large of an opportunity there was with underemployment in sectors like the warehouse world. Feeding things like accident data, human performance data allows us to focus on the high-value tasks that improve worker safety and worker health and allow workers to redeploy elsewhere. We are excited about being able to tailor what our product offerings are to the needs of the broader workforce.
▶ 0:51:47Chair Budd: Do you think that would help with adoption? There's a general fear about job replacement that's a generalized concern. If you show massive areas of underemployment like warehouse and logistics where there is need for more workers, do you think that would help with adoption in those areas?
▶ 0:52:08Dr. Shelton: Absolutely. We see the pressure from the business community that would love to adopt this kind of technology. Without naming a specific retailer, we were approached by a small but nationwide retailer years ago looking for a back warehouse out of edition -- automation solution. It was not possible with the technology that was available to us circa 2020 to engage with them.
▶ 0:52:35Dr. Shelton: The broader look at the labor pressures faced by those businesses in particular would be super helpful.
▶ 0:52:42Chair Budd: If you had a conversation in 2020, now in 2026 you have the same conversation, do you have market abilities?
▶ 0:52:52Dr. Shelton: We do. There is a rollout question. Do you tackle the low hanging fruit first or go for the heart end of the spectrum? Technologically, the advances ai has shown in the last three years significantly lowers the barrier to entry to address those businesses.
▶ 0:53:09Chair Budd: Thank you. Ranking member.
▶ 0:53:14Sen. Baldwin: The administration suggest through its recently released maritime action plan that ai can be used to increase domestic shipbuilding capacity. Currently the united states produces less than 1% of ships globally. We used to be dominant in the industry. The effort to revitalize domestic shipbuilding requires cooperation and input from government, the private sector, labor and more.
▶ 0:53:44Sen. Baldwin: Ms. ng, where do you see the most promising opportunities to use ai to increase domestic shipbuilding capacity? How is siemens working with organized labor and workers in the shipbuilding sector to identify opportunities to use ai to expand and enable our workforce to increase output, including repair and maintenance?
▶ 0:54:14Sen. Baldwin: I gave you a cluster of questions. Can we attract workers to expand our capabilities if they continue to hear that ai might displace their jobs? Go at it.
▶ 0:54:26Ms. Ng: Thank you very much for the question. I will start by sharing a little bit about what industrial ai can do to recapture the american dominance of shipbuilding here in the U.S. what we are seeing is that by the usage of industrial ai in all aspects of the life cycle for shipbuilding is really critical. I will give three examples.
▶ 0:54:52Ms. Ng: In design, industrial ai allows us to test and model thousands of configurations of a ship in hours as opposed to months. This allows us to do quicker designed turn and be able to design ships very quickly.
▶ 0:55:12Ms. Ng: We are seeing with production, we are using industrial ai to help basically simulate material flow, workforce allocation and sequencing of work packages so that work done in a back shop on a shipyard is very efficiently sequenced and done quickly. This allows us to execute on the work and all those great designs even faster. The third example I can give is sustainment.
▶ 0:55:40Ms. Ng: We are using industrial ai applications to preserve uptime so that all of our machines and all of our capabilities in the shipyard and the back shops are able to operate efficiently. We are seeing that bringing that lifecycle view together we are very able to be able to reestablish that dominance.
▶ 0:56:01Ms. Ng: The other question you had around how we continue to support the work force make sure we are able to retain that workforce is pretty straightforward. We have to have a strategy to attract workforce and retain them, meaning the workforce is becoming increasingly digitally native. They have expectations.
▶ 0:56:28Ms. Ng: They want to work with top-of-the-line software and ai enabled tools. We are honored to provide that as part of talent acquisition strategies for manufacturers and shipbuilders specifically.
▶ 0:56:38Sen. Baldwin: I want to encourage you to have them at the table from the beginning, not introduce them at the end. Mr. muro, he co-authored a piec e. You know that local officials have the leverage to engage with developers of becoming true local partners in their community.
▶ 0:57:05Sen. Baldwin: The article highlights some efforts in wisconsin, microsoft partnership with the university wisconsin madison and the development of the ai co-innovation lab and their partnership with gateway technical college to train workers. What should local officials be trying to get out of these negotiations? There's a lot of that going on in wisconsin.
▶ 0:57:28Mr. Muro: Wisconsin is a demonstration almost like an aerial view of data center development that is in a region tied to broader economic achievement for the region. That's because they are technology themselves.
▶ 0:57:55Mr. Muro: They are a source of computer processing high-speed technology that could be tied in and is being tied in to regional university activity, research and so on. Then there are users of energy and places for energy innovation.
▶ 0:58:15Mr. Muro: Data centers can be thought of in a very broad way along with their important national demonstration. Their national push towards powering the total technology.
▶ 0:58:37Mr. Muro: Places have the possibility to work and enter into interactions with the hyperscalers early in the process. We think there's an opportunity for them to trade very quick initial ability to save -- excuse me -- and to establish
▶ 0:59:11Mr. Muro: Quick permitting in response and a trade with the companies to build these kind of partnerships in the region. The more a region has a sense of its technology goals and where those intersect with the hyperscalers, and I think there are lots of areas for particular research, work on energy issues, testbeds of all sorts.
▶ 0:59:42Mr. Muro: I think there is a wider array of possibilities in the regions.
▶ 0:59:49Chair Budd: Senator cruz, you are recognized chair cruis -- recognized.
▶ 1:00:00Chair Cruz: Let's start with a broad question. Ai is a fundamental transformational technology and like past waves of innovation we don't know exactly how it will impact our economy, including what it will do to employment. One of the greatest fears I hear from people's concerned that ai will take their jobs and lead to fewer jobs. Mr.
▶ 1:00:28Chair Cruz: Giannikopoulos, what do you say to those concerns? What are you experiencing in your current job markets and how do you anticipate ai shifting the job market in respective industries?
▶ 1:00:45Mr. Giannikopoulos: Thank you for that question. The crisis in health care is real and happening right now. There are around 900,000 physicians in the united states. The projected shortage of physicians by 2030 is 187,000. The projected shortage of nurses by 2030 is 194,000. The gap is growing. The need is there.
▶ 1:01:16Mr. Giannikopoulos: Specifically within radiology. If you look at the attrition rate over the past five years, it is up by 50% compared to historical norms. The projection is that imaging volume will rise by 26% in the next 30 years. Continued growth and continued need. The immediate past president of the radiological society did a task-based analysis of the work of radiologists.
▶ 1:01:42Mr. Giannikopoulos: He estimated within the next five years the amount of work a radiologist will do could possibly go down by 33%, yet the need for them to perform that understanding and make those diagnoses so the patient will get the care will only increase. Ai is not replacing the physician. It's enabling them so we can leverage them to get where we need to be as a health care --is a healthy society.
▶ 1:02:09Ms. Ng: In our experience advanced technologies support workforce expansion, not contraction. This is especially true in my sector of shipbuilding where we are seeing these advanced technologies driving increased demand for highly spilled -- highly skilled trades. Ai is not diminishing the need for skilled workers, it is amplifying it.
▶ 1:02:37Ms. Ng: It reinforces the need for strong technical skills and for people who are passionate about innovating it. The best example I have is in fort worth, texas. We have the latest and greatest siemens facility that was just stood up. In fort worth, we used digital twin and ai enabled tools to model the entire production floor and simulate it before even breaking ground. This facility created hundreds of new jobs in that area.
▶ 1:03:09Ms. Ng: The employees that are working there are operating in reduced complexity and much better training. In summary, the greater risk to jobs in our opinion is that losing industrial competitiveness, not responsible modernization. Thank you.
▶ 1:03:24Dr. Shelton: Thank you for the question. I can give two examples with human labor. In the warehouse and logistics world, there are two problems. In extreme growth in the sector over the last 10 or 15 years. All of us love our next day prime shipping but he created a completely unsustainable growth trajectory in the industry.
▶ 1:03:51Dr. Shelton: You can pool slack out of the rest of the economy from a human labor standpoint, or you can deploy automation. Companies have tried to do both like the amazon example. As a sector it is still coming up short from a total employment count standpoint. The second and the more exciting piece is it changes fundamentally the nature of what a job is.
▶ 1:04:18Dr. Shelton: As a private pilot delivering airmail meant you put on your goggles, got into your biplane and you flew across the U.S. personally carrying the mail. There's not been an almost logistics systems for shipping by air and you can say he work in the industry will someone from the 1930's would not recognize with the job has evolved into. That is why I got it to robotics.
▶ 1:04:40Dr. Shelton: That is super excited to me and the evolution of agriculture has a notoriously terrible grower of corn, people are not aware of how hard modern agricultural jobs are and how far we have come. I'm an optimist about this and I think we should be cognizant that there are evolutions of jobs over time. We should be sensitive to that but it is also the path forward.
▶ 1:05:04Chair Cruz: Two final questions. What is something you hope I I can do in your industry that we can't currently do yet? Number two, what is a surprising way you have seen ai used that you do not expect?
▶ 1:05:20Mr. Giannikopoulos: I will answer the same way but from two different perspectives. If you look at medicine pathways, ai has opened it up in ways we have not seen. Take my personal diagnosis. It was 10 years to that ultimately. 10 years of varying symptoms that were dismissed because I was a white male with greek heritage in florida, which is not common for multiple sclerosis.
▶ 1:05:48Mr. Giannikopoulos: Being able to identify this numbness in different parts and pieces, personalized to me as an individual, could have shortened the cycle of diagnosis. It is already starting to do that but with better integration, better understanding, better tailoring of the medicine and the understanding to the individual who can take that to the next level, this is where we get into predictive cancer scores, different things like that to identify a path the person is on, not when they are already on
▶ 1:06:19Mr. Giannikopoulos: It but before they start and make a big difference.
▶ 1:06:23Ms. Ng: To answer your first question, we want to see ai adopted throughout the entire lifecycle as opposed to in silos, like just design or production or just sustainment. For the second question, what has surprised me the most is seeing the application of industrial ai with the U.S. navy, my customer.
▶ 1:06:49Ms. Ng: We have been able to work with the navy to digitally model the shipyards and help them be able to plan for future work. You have a whole maintenance plan that comes associated with that. What is surprising is the ability to use industrial ai to actually model out new dry docks, new back shops, all the new physical infrastructure that does not disrupt the current availability in the work happening there. Thank you. 6 the first time we did --6
▶ 1:07:22Dr. Shelton: It took an engineer 5.5 weeks to prototype that. By 2023, in the video is on our youtube channel, we decided to hook an early version of chatgpt up to it to see if you could write code and run the robot. , shockingly and I was complete the gob smacked, he worked on the first try. Nothing in technology ever works on the first try so that was interesting.
▶ 1:07:48Dr. Shelton: At the time it was not hardened or deployable but as a shot across the bowel of things that were to come it was super interesting. This get back to the question of a data set availability. That work is assigned we can take descriptions of tasks we want robots to do and use automated tool sets to get them deployed as rapidly as possible. It's an exciting and novel side of the industry that continues to surprise most of us in the field.
▶ 1:08:18Chair Cruz: Thank you.
▶ 1:08:19Chair Budd: Thank you, chairman. Senator blunt rochester.
▶ 1:08:27Sen. Blunt: Rochester: I get excited about this topic. I was former secretary of labor to delaware and head of state personnel. I also had the opportunity in the house when I served in the house to start a bipartisan future work caucus.
▶ 1:08:50Sen. Blunt: For me, if anybody says they know the answers are or whether the economy -- we will have more jobs are less jobs, you really don't know. This is also new and so impactful in so many parts of our lives. I'm on the health committee. Health care. I have a nursing workforce shortage bill.
▶ 1:09:15Sen. Blunt: From an ag state, we think about precision agriculture. I saw a woman use an ipad to control her crops. This is very important. Our state has a statewide ai commission. We are setting of clear guardrails on ethics, safety, transparency across models, on training, creating a regulatory sandbox, and also new legislation.
▶ 1:09:44Sen. Blunt: We also have two land-grant institutions, the university of delaware and delaware state university, that are turning ai into a real world innovation and workforce pathways. We have a lot of local companies who are deploying new hardware to improve ai systems. We also have two pair ai adoption with real safety guardrails and policies that ensure we strengthen our workforce and set of sidelining it.
▶ 1:10:15Sen. Blunt: That is one of the -- for me, I'm a pragmatic optimist. Let's put it that way. There are good things but I understand we don't want to leave people behind. Whether it is a podcast, magazines, the atlantic, the ai in future of work, it is truly everywhere. We are reshaping how we work.
▶ 1:10:38Sen. Blunt: I want to tailor my questions to something picking up on senator baldwin about the workforce and how the workforce is included as the changes are happening. I will start with Ms. ng. What does engagement with your workforce look like when it comes to designing and implementing ai related changes? Can I start with you?
▶ 1:11:04Ms. Ng: Thank you for the question. As I mentioned in the opening statement, what we have found at siemens is that digital transformation truly does work best when the worker is at the center. That is over a multitude of ways. The best way I can provide a story is a story from the puget sound naval shipyard.
▶ 1:11:33Ms. Ng: There is a superintendent of back shop 31 at puget sound. She truly demonstrates what effective partnership look like when we are trying to solve a problem using a digital technology. What I mean is that this superintended leads from a place of empathy. She knows the struggles and pain points her workforce is managing.
▶ 1:11:56Sen. Blunt Rochester: Is there a specific -- for all of you I will submit questions for the record because I have a lot of questions and I don't have a lot of time. I will follow up with you. Is there a specific process you use of getting that information and then turning it into your policies? I know, Mr.
▶ 1:12:18Sen. Blunt Rochester: Muro, you said brookings analysis suggests 30% of workers could see at least 50% of their documentation tasks disrupted by genitive ai in the coming years.
▶ 1:12:34Sen. Blunt Rochester: Even with the updating of tasks, can someone share with me how you include workers in making sure that they are re-skilled and trained in and trained and have what they need to keep up. I have 41 seconds.
▶ 1:12:52Mr. Muro: First, those statistics are directional. Clearly there is tremendous uncertainty around. We are talking about a pathway. We know that there will be significant disruption. Disruption can be positive or negative. We think significant aspects of ai's impact on work will be disruptive but also beneficial.
▶ 1:13:21Sen. Blunt Rochester: I understand the difference between a horse in a buggy and now we have cars. I am looking for and we will follow up with each of you, what specific things are we doing to prepare the workforce? And also include them in the health and decision-making of how to make sure it is not so disruptive? I love the issue of coding. We were pushing people to go into coding and other machines can code.
▶ 1:13:53Sen. Blunt Rochester: As I'm thinking about the future and how I think Dr. shelton said the changing nature of the workforce, I would love to have conversations with each of you about what can we do as congress to ensure we are not leaving anybody behind, but at the same time we are benefiting from the technology. I am out of time. I yield back. Thank you, Mr. chairman.
▶ 1:14:22Sen. Blackburn: To each of you, thank you for being here. Establishing a framework for a.I. Is going to be very important for congress to do. President trump asked me to take the first stab at drafting the trump-america a.I. Act based off of his executive order. I was pleased that the executive order included protections for what I call the four c's.
▶ 1:14:58Sen. Blackburn: Children, creators, communities and censorship. We know that a.I. And the llm's are biased against a lot of conservatives. In tennessee I like to say we have a good, bad and ugly relationship with a.I.. Our manufacturing logistics, healthcare, really like it.
▶ 1:15:24Sen. Blackburn: A lot of our innovators who hold patents in trademarks and work with our auto industry and the entertainment industry with our musicians, songwriters, screenwriters, script writers are really concerned about what it is going to be and their ability to protect their name, image and likeness.
▶ 1:15:50Sen. Blackburn: So having the proper gorillas employees -- proper guard rails in place is important. We know that every sector has those guardrails except the virtual space. Once we define what the rules are, we free up innovators to take off and do great work because they know what the playing field is. They can develop a strategy to win.
▶ 1:16:16Sen. Blackburn: That is the purpose of having the trump-america a.I. Act and putting these protections in place. I think it is Mr. giannikopoulos .
▶ 1:16:43Sen. Blackburn: As you know, nashville area really is the healthcare informatics in healthcare interaction technology hub and we are seeing so much innovation that is taking place there and when it comes to predictive diagnosis, disease analysis, remote surgeries, telehealth, we have seen the benefit of these
▶ 1:17:14Sen. Blackburn: Applications. The but comes into place when we talk about creating a digital health ecosystem and privacy concerns that are there. In your work, I want you to talk about that importance as an innovator and a patient. I am going to give you one minute and if you want to submit something longer form, I will welcome that.
▶ 1:17:44Mr. Giannikopoulos: As a developer within healthcare, we are clearly within the scope of hippa. Hippa is an elastic rule.
▶ 1:17:58Sen. Blackburn: It needs to be modernized. In order to include all of this. It covers the paper and the fax machine.
▶ 1:18:08Mr. Giannikopoulos: With electronics we have the ability to audit. That is the comfort -- transformation we have gone through. What I see out of the large institutions is they are approaching this as workforce transformation. It is not just leveraging technology to do what you have always done. It is how can you do something new with it. As a patient, that is where the benefit is. If you receive better care as a result.
▶ 1:18:35Sen. Blackburn: Ms. ng, let's talk about the difference between industrial applications and commercial applications. I think this gets lost many times as we talk about how consumers approach the utilization of the technology and their expectation of that.
▶ 1:18:58Sen. Blackburn: As we develop policy through the years, I have told people look at the computer and look at the backside and the front side. And there is truly a difference that is there. The fact that a.I. Coupled with the other computational sciences like quantum is going to yield faster, more accurate results that talk about the difference in the industrial and the commercial.
▶ 1:19:27Ms. Ng: Thank you, senator. In a manufacturing industrial environment, often times the work is safety critical and operating at a high tolerance environment meaning that precision matters importantly. Consumer a.I. Is using all of the internet to analyze data and do various things. Industrial a.I.
▶ 1:19:53Ms. Ng: Is using much more controlled data sets from machines on the floor from manufacturing systems and from digital engineering data sets and it is using that controlled data to generate insights and make recommendations ultimately the human is still the decision authority to confirm what to do next.
▶ 1:20:11Sen. Blackburn: Thank you. As we look at training our children, need to have stem labs in all of our schools even though much coding will be done by a.I., kids need to code just like they need to learn a language. They need to have that understanding. We look forward to building that policy out as we move forward. Thank you, Mr. chairman.
▶ 1:20:39Chair Cruz: Senator moreno.
▶ 1:20:43Sen. Moreno: Thank you. Thank you for this hearing. It is very important and very topical. I will start with you, demetri. We will call you by your first name. In the 1920's would it surprise you that there were people saying that machines will devour man?
▶ 1:21:09Mr. Giannikopoulos: I believe they were called cars.
▶ 1:21:12Sen. Moreno: Exactly. In the 1950's in m.I.t. Professor did a study that said that basically we are stumbling into the automation era and all workers will be replaced. Does that sound familiar?
▶ 1:21:25Mr. Giannikopoulos: Absolutely.
▶ 1:21:27Sen. Moreno: In the 1980's there was a book written called "the robot is after your job."
▶ 1:21:33Mr. Giannikopoulos: The excel spreadsheet was going to replace accountants.
▶ 1:21:37Sen. Moreno: The doom and gloom has been around for forever. It is important to talk about employment america. In 1920's there were 42 million americans employed. In the 1950's that number one to 63 million. So obviously wrong. In the 1980's the number is 108 million. In the 1990's the internet was going to replace all retail businesses. There was no point in being in retail.
▶ 1:22:06Sen. Moreno: The internet was going to completely diss intermediate everybody. 130 one million people employed. In the 2000s's and smartphones, 160 million people employed and thanks to the policies we put in place with this congress, we now have a record number of americans employed, 172 million. The mark twain expression, the nose of our death, is exaggerated. Employment continues to grow.
▶ 1:22:32Sen. Moreno: With that said, what we can all agree on and I want to get your thought. I will start with you. There is no way I am taking a shot at your name either. What is different about this period of time from your point of view from the introduction of a.I. Versus what I just laid out?
▶ 1:22:50Ms. Ng: Thank you for the question. There is an incredible story about albert einstein running -- riding on a train back in the day and the conductor is stamping tickets and he sees einstein looking for his ticket. He looks up and says, Mr. einstein, it is ok. I know who you are. He continues on his way. He can see einstein still scrambling. He goes back to say, Mr. einstein, truly it is fine. I know who you are.
▶ 1:23:21Ms. Ng: I know that you bought a ticket. Albert einstein says, thank you. I also know who I am. What I don't know, is where I'm going. I think that story really gets at the heart of what you are mentioning which is ultimately what we need to be doing now is partnering with industry to define what that compelling vision and that roadmap is and that is what I do every single day on the ground with my customers, partnering with them to define one of the actual
▶ 1:23:51Ms. Ng: Business outcomes you are trying to achieve and how can we fully channel these industrial a.I. Solutions and applications toward that outcome. To answer your question, I believe that what is interesting and know about this technology is that we have the ability to explicitly help specific business outcomes. Thank you.
▶ 1:24:10Sen. Moreno: Obviously, productivity improvements are the key. That expression has been used. You will not lose your job to a.I.. But you will lose your job to somebody who uses a.I. Dr. shelton, I want to shift to you on this part of the question. This is moving much faster than these other rollouts. This is definitely at a speed that we are not used to. What I worry about is our institutions that train people.
▶ 1:24:40Sen. Moreno: Are they prepared for the speed? What are your thoughts on that?
▶ 1:24:44Dr. Shelton: It is a qualified yes to your question although I would agree that the speed is very different. I think something that everybody in this room has had to grapple with with a.I. Is we did not perceive automation coming for our jobs or evolving the nature of work for us as largely knowledge workers.
▶ 1:25:08Dr. Shelton: Ironically people more on the manual labor and blue-collar side of the universe have had several hundred years to get used to the idea of using tools to accomplish more than they could have accomplished on their own. That is why I used the farming example in my opening statement.
▶ 1:25:23Dr. Shelton: Those of us who deal on the side of the universe have not had options to deploy autonomous agents into the last six months to go off and do portions of the tasks that we are using them for, not to do the job but to do a component of it. All of us on the knowledge end of the economy have to evolve rapidly to start understanding our job as managing fleets of autonomous workers who are working on our behalf as opposed to doing that work ourselves.
▶ 1:25:54Dr. Shelton: That is quite different. From a university standpoint this might be a pivot back to the political arms. This is something my wife who was an english professor likes to remind me of. She has known all along that it was all about talking and I have to concede that that is looking like it is going to be the case over the next 20 years.
▶ 1:26:10Sen. Moreno: Thank you.
▶ 1:26:13Chair Cruz: Thank you, senator moreno. Senator hickenlooper, you are recognized.
▶ 1:26:21Sen. Hickenlooper: Thank you. This is going to be a very timely hearing. Let me start by talking a little bit about product testing. Mr. giannikopoulos, I think that's close. Thank you for sharing how a.I. Has integrated software to support quality and deliver quality healthcare to patients.
▶ 1:26:53Sen. Hickenlooper: As you know, software, hardware is rigorously tested before they are used with patients. We are working on bipartisan legislation called the vet a.I. Act which promotes evidence-based practices to help companies have their a.I. Tools independently evaluated by independent third parties.
▶ 1:27:21Sen. Hickenlooper: This helps increase transparency, promote accountability for responsible systems. To the large extent it creates trust in customers. Mr. giannikopoulos, would you describe what rad ai is doing now, whether it's products are sufficiently tested before they go into action?
▶ 1:27:50Mr. Giannikopoulos: We are a company founded by radiologists for radiologists. Dr. jeff chang at the time of his graduation at 17 years of age, a very smart man, has been central to the design of these solutions. He was a practicing radiologist when he created the idea of rad ai. We have continue to engage with radiologists to validate the usage and understand exactly how it integrates with the workflow.
▶ 1:28:20Mr. Giannikopoulos: The other key piece that needs to be built with the adoption of a.I. And health care in particular is trust. The way to gain trust is there is the technical nature, the transparency, the information about how you build your models. But there is also leveraging relationships. We have one with the adventures group to integrate the century of knowledge that they have available directly into the application for the radiologists. So it's not just a.I.
▶ 1:28:47Mr. Giannikopoulos: Assisting them with the diagnosis. It is a.I. Plus trusted and validated information right at the point of care.
▶ 1:28:57Sen. Hickenlooper: Ok. Ms. ng, is that right? I'm not scared of these difficult names. Unusual names. I have a difficult name, hickenlooper. Thanks for your testimony in sharing all the work that siemens is doing around how a.I. Is going to help sectors of the industrial economy. It is clear we are in the middle of a revolution.
▶ 1:29:28Sen. Hickenlooper: I think it is a great transition , doing simple things. Moving toward clean energy. We will look back 50 years from now and see the beginning of this great transition. In terms of a.I. It is going to define how a.I. Supports the growth of small businesses and entrepreneurs but also attract students to stem fields.
▶ 1:29:53Sen. Hickenlooper: Over the -- ultimately it will transform the workforce. When two people into into a contract, it is important that it is transparent but also that it is enforceable for how an a.I. System can be used or misused. Ms. ng, how does siemens ensure it is transparent with its customers about the design itself?
▶ 1:30:18Ms. Ng: Thank you the question. Transparency is critical to trust which we were just speaking about. There are several ways that we at siemens ensure that we are providing full visibility into not only how industrial a.I. Is being used in environments like a beer manufacturing customer that we have in colorado but throughout all of the sectors of the united states and it really comes down to two things.
▶ 1:30:50Ms. Ng: One is allowing the industrial a.I. Application to be able to share the source of data so pulling from which machines, which engineering data sets and which manufacturing systems that it is producing from. The second is providing explanation or evaluation of why that recommendation is being made, which comes down to the ability that we were speaking about earlier of training folks to be able to work in systems oversight roles so they can
▶ 1:31:20Ms. Ng: Engage more effectively with that industrial a.I. Capability. Thank you.
▶ 1:31:24Sen. Hickenlooper: Great. I will hold off. I have a couple of of the questions that you can submit in writing. They are slave drivers in terms of keeping us on our time.
▶ 1:31:39Chair Cruz: Senator young, you are recognized.
▶ 1:31:43Sen. Young: Thank you to our witnesses for being here today. Ms. ng, I would like to build on the previous questioning anger response. We need to unlock more industrial data, spatial data, a lot of it. So that embodied a.I. Or a.I.
▶ 1:32:10Sen. Young: Used to control machines in the physical space can continue to move forward. China, a country we care about because we compete with them on a number of levels. They lead the world in terms of deploying industrial robots, collecting the sort of data.
▶ 1:32:32Sen. Young: We will have to develop a different set of rules and practices consistent with our values and laws. For starters we need to distinguish between industrial a.I. And consumer a.I.. I have some legislation with several colleagues call the a.I. Public awareness and education campaign act. This seeks to provide transparency into a.I., its promises, limitations and what consumers can expect from it.
▶ 1:33:02Sen. Young: Too often we think about a.I. And our minds immediately naturally move toward generative a.I. Rather than the a.I. We have been living with and using for the past several decades. You are correct in your testimony that what we in congress do on consumer facing a.I. Should not impede the innovation and deployment of technology and manufacturing, like with the work you were doing in the maritime space for example.
▶ 1:33:32Sen. Young: As you may know I introduced legislation called the shifts for america act. This is legislation to reinvigorate american shipbuilding. An item that fortunately republicans and democrats alike have gotten behind. It is something that president trump has prioritized for his administration. I understand that siemens recently created a new maritime business to address the opportunities the company perceived in the shipbuilding and ship repair industries.
▶ 1:34:03Sen. Young: Can you walk me through the benefits these types of industrial a.I. Capabilities can have in the effort for america to reclaim our shipbuilding dominance?
▶ 1:34:12Ms. Ng: Absolutely. Thank you for the question. What I would start with is by saying that if america truly does want to reclaim shipbuilding dominance globally, we have to outpace our competitors. Not just in labor, but in building out these digital capabilities. And industrial a.I. Is indisputably a force multiplier here.
▶ 1:34:40Ms. Ng: We think about tackling industrial a.I. And shipbuilding across three different areas of a ship's life cycle starting in design, through production and into sustainment. We apply applications of industrial a.I. Across each area of that lifecycle, everything from doing faster more precise design using a.I. Simulations through predictive maintenance making sure that machines in the back shop are available and ready to roll for every single task that is needed.
▶ 1:35:12Ms. Ng: If I were to summarize, the most important thing is that we are using industrial a.I. To help sequence work so that it is done more efficiently and quickly. This reduces rework and it makes work better in the shipyards because people are able to execute the first time and operate in a more productive environment. . Thank you. .
▶ 1:35:38Sen. Young: As some of my constituents watch this, they may think, wait a second, more productivity. That means higher wages. That is a byproduct often times of these types of investments, whether it is yesterday's capital investment or today's a.I. Investments. I do want to underscore that.
▶ 1:36:03Sen. Young: What is siemens doing to upscale the american workforce more broadly to ensure workers can succeed in these high-tech, high demand a.I. Empowered roles?
▶ 1:36:16Ms. Ng: Thank you for the question, senator. We are doing a lot but if I were to summarize I would pick two different things. One is we are working with an ecosystem of partners to develop what we call micro-credentials for shipbuilding specifically but more broadly for manufacturing. This is creating pragmatic ready to use credentials that might be a day, a week or a month long and they prepare the workforce to go into modern shipbuilding and start operating on day one.
▶ 1:36:47Ms. Ng: The second piece is that I am incredibly proud that siemens has committed to training 200,000 electricians and manufacturing experts by 2030. We are not doing it alone. We are working with public-private partners, universities, community colleges and trade programs to do that. I am proud to share that today. Thank you.
▶ 1:37:05Sen. Young: Thank you for your answers. Mr. chairman.
▶ 1:37:10Chair Cruz: Thank you. Senator cantwell.
▶ 1:37:16Sen. Cantwell: Thank you and I thank you and ranking member baldwin for this important hearing and the witnesses for being here today to talk about some of the most innovative things that can help our economy going forward. I want to mention we have an n sfaii education act that talks about some of the small business trading act with senator moran so we are getting this across all aspects of our economy. And the future of a.I.
▶ 1:37:44Sen. Cantwell: Act that my colleagues senator young and senator hickenlooper and blackburn, mostly on safety and security. The thing I wanted to focus on was the science side of the equation. I represent a big national lab. The laboratories across our country represent a unique opportunity to take science research that basically might take you years to do and now drive it down to months.
▶ 1:38:14Sen. Cantwell: One of the things I am very worried about that we got 10,000 stem phd's from federal agencies in 2025. That is not a good idea. I represent one of the most scientific regions of our country. We like scientists because they are in there creating the next generation of economic competitiveness and solutions. Certainly when you look at the massive amount of a.I.
▶ 1:38:41Sen. Cantwell: Investment that is trying -- that china is making, you want to keep your scientific workforce because they are going to help you. One of the things I am most interested in hearing from may be you, Mr. muro or Dr. shelton has held transformative biology and chemistry lab work can be, compressing it into a few months. As I mentioned the pacific northwest lab is doing that already on deploying autonomous platforms.
▶ 1:39:12Sen. Cantwell: You are basically creating everything from discovery and bio energy to advanced materials and fusion but you are getting it done in months instead of years. I would assume that people think that this kind of a.I. Accelerated discovery is worth the commitment and worth getting this done and probably most important thing that we could be doing. Dr. shelton or Mr. muro.
▶ 1:39:42Mr. Muro: One general thing here is that we can make alignment of our computing and a.I. Systems and our data and our talent. But we have to have the ongoing basic scientific activity functioning at a high level as well. Because really all of that is essentially training for the next iteration of all that innovation.
▶ 1:40:12Mr. Muro: That is one of the things that a comprehensive attempt to leverage a.I. For national good would want to look at is making sure that you have all dimensions of the a.I. Machinery working. And we do think that actual science, scientific activity and the talent it collects is absolutely central.
▶ 1:40:42Sen. Cantwell: Dr. shelton?
▶ 1:40:44Dr. Shelton: Logistics in warehouse work has already seen the problem that we call islands of automation. You might have a conveyor belt and a ground vehicle carrying something and they have to get a piece of material from the autonomous ground vehicle to the conveyor belt.
▶ 1:41:04Dr. Shelton: Research has similar problems although typically with high-tech devices where you have the existing automation like a machine that does dna analysis and some other piece of equipment that you have to connect and robotics and general-purpose platforms to address that. This is not my field although I do have friends who work in this.
▶ 1:41:24Dr. Shelton: One of the most exciting things that agi or narrow agi is able to offer is outsize performance within a particular problem area. If you are familiar with the alpha fold problem out of the mind, you can get a.I.
▶ 1:41:41Dr. Shelton: That is super good at a very narrow task and that feeding into a lab structure that is highly automated allows you to go from the conceptual computation side down to the lab work and in a very compressed process.
▶ 1:41:57Sen. Cantwell: Somebody at home, how do they understand what you just said? We spend a lot of money in our national labs. They are critical to our competitiveness as a nation. We are also proud of our universities. But when I look at uw versus pnnl, there is a huge size difference in the amount of research being done. Now you will apply a.I.
▶ 1:42:22Sen. Cantwell: To that and translate that science into fast application as I am saying, not years, but months, this is a huge initiative we should be undertaking, to take all of that research. You just gave one example but you are basically taking one of our big research arms and you are basically saying let's make sure we apply a.I. Because it is one of our most competitive efforts.
▶ 1:42:54Dr. Shelton: One of the things and we have seen this in robotics research itself is you have a human with an idea and wants to see that translated into something practical. For your question of how would I explain this to someone who is not sitting from the perspective of a robotics lab, you have an idea, you have to get that translated into some sort of physical reality and then you have to test that physical reality. I think where a.I.
▶ 1:43:12Dr. Shelton: Allows us to inject the best short-term safety control piece of this is to work with the human researcher to get the math part of the process turned into something physical that can then be tested whether it is in the medical space or elsewhere in the industry and allow us to actually reduce something that we can practice as rapidly as possible.
▶ 1:43:33Sen. Cantwell: I know I am over my time. We are spending $10 billion on lab efforts that are all about all of these issues. I am just saying, one area to double your investment is to basically say we are spending 10 billion dollars here. We have already decided this is really important. We are saying apply a.I. To that effort to make it more efficient. We have already decided that is where we are spending our money. You just gave two really good examples of what that acceleration can deliver.
▶ 1:44:04Sen. Cantwell: Thank you, Mr. chairman.
▶ 1:44:05Chair Cruz: Thank you, senator. Senator rosen.
▶ 1:44:11Sen. Rosen: This is really an important hearing. I want to thank all of the witnesses for being here today. I want to start with you Ms. ng. I want to talk a little bit about a.I. Standards and trust. Earlier this year I led a delegation to see -- yes in las vegas. We were able to stop by the siemens booth, innovating on a.I.
▶ 1:44:40Sen. Rosen: And other tools and I am so excited to see you here testifying today. You outlined how using a.I. In advanced manufacturing has the potential for enormous benefits. However the financial risks of an accurate outcome from an unreliable a.I. Tool is still very high. There for your customers have to have a clear incentive to ensure a.I. Tools that they integrate are trustworthy and reliable. What standards of trust and reliability are your customers demanding?
▶ 1:45:10Sen. Rosen: Are there best practices or standards that should be considered from the industry?
▶ 1:45:24Ms. Ng: Absolutely. I am so glad you got to visit us. Always a wonderful event. To answer your question, the most important thing in defining trust is having really strong underlying data that informs the industrial a.I. Application. What that means is being able to tap into machine generated operational data on a shopfloor, manufacturing systems data and digital engineering data sets that all come together to be able to support analysis and recommendations and generate insights.
▶ 1:45:56Ms. Ng: What is interesting is that is a huge piece of my business today at siemens is supporting our customers in delivering what we call the digital authoritative backbone for engineering. That serves as the foundation of which all operational capabilities are built on top. Thank you.
▶ 1:46:14Sen. Rosen: Thank you. I really do believe and I'm sure you do too without a clear federal standards and guardrails a.I. Tools that are sold to consumers and small businesses and large businesses, but small businesses in particular, they have less of any leverage. They could have potential to cause significant harm so we have to be sure we are paying attention. Want to talk about small business and a.I.
▶ 1:46:42Sen. Rosen: Adoption because many companies have prioritized a.I. Adoption, trying to find where this tool can improve efficiency, add value to their business. How do you grow? We need to ensure that the potential benefits as we are seeing today do not continue to disproportionately benefit only the largest corporations and have the capital and the influence to adopt safe a.I.'s, large language models and all of the other things that go along with it.
▶ 1:47:14Sen. Rosen: I want to say with you, you have a range of customer sizes. Large legacy brands like pepsico to very small businesses and startups. What is the biggest challenge you would say that your smaller customers face adopting a.I. And what can congress do as we think about -- I am also on the small business and entrepreneurship committee so I want to think about the large businesses and small. What can congress do to ensure that the a.I. Adoption gap does not widen leaving small innovators potentially behind?
▶ 1:47:44Ms. Ng: Absolutely. This is an incredibly important question. We think about adoption for small and midsize businesses in three ways. It is awareness, ability and willingness. Awareness is being able to communicate and understand the art of the possible, truly, what are the business outcomes that industrial a.I. Can unlock for that business.
▶ 1:48:10Ms. Ng: Ability is yes to your point, sometimes capital but it is also the aligned incentives with most leadership as ranking member baldwin mentioned, the ability to also have the factory floor workers involved in the process. The third piece is willingness. This is my biggest passion in life, organizational change management. Making sure that there is an intentional rollout plan to all segments of the workforce to ensure that that adoption happens.
▶ 1:48:40Sen. Rosen: I only have a few seconds for my last question because your passion is going to lead me to ask this question. A.I. Literacy. You are enthusiastic about getting it out to everybody. Can we talk about how a.I. Literacy closes that a.I. Adoption gap that we want to happen? Thank you for setting me up for that question.
▶ 1:49:02Mr. Muro: I would just say that this is where regional ecosystems can be extremely helpful. Regional learning ecosystems, regional technology ecosystems and as part of that work to make sure that adoption does include these features. More and more regions are beginning to find their own level on these technology solutions.
▶ 1:49:32Mr. Muro: I think the federal government has historically had a role in supporting regional economic development. I think we can be more pointed about that and may be making this a central area because the talent piece and the talent piece are intimately connected to the kind of broad adoption that we are talking about
▶ 1:50:02Mr. Muro: Technologically.
▶ 1:50:02Sen. Rosen: Thank you again for all of your work and for being here. A great hearing. Thank you, Mr. chairman. Ranking member baldwin, you are recognized.
▶ 1:50:15Sen. Baldwin: Thank you senator rosen has queued me up for my question and as we do a quick second round before closing. Mr. muro, I appreciate you highlighting worker security in your testimony. In wisconsin we are proud of being the first in the country to pass a law relating to apprenticeships and registered apprenticeships. We did that in 1911. The U.S. did not follow suit until 1937.
▶ 1:50:47Sen. Baldwin: With the first apprenticeship law the country, we continue to break enrollment records in part because our apprenticeships focus on in demand fields. I would like it if you could talk a little bit more about the opportunities to integrate artificial intelligence into registered apprenticeships and how these programs can help with retraining workers in the a.I. World.
▶ 1:51:17Mr. Muro: I think our view of apprenticeships is highly shaped by its industrial past and that is an incredibly important thing and a place that it can be utilized and merge with a.I.. A.I. Can also add to the learning and training dimensions of apprenticeship through tutorials. A.I. Online supports.
▶ 1:51:49Mr. Muro: I think that we should think of apprenticeship as especially a way to get hands-on work experience and we are going to need that more and more because it is going to become clear that strictly higher education degrees are not going to be, may be more vulnerable to change than very specific subject matter hands-on experience with people learning.
▶ 1:52:22Mr. Muro: I think that this is an extremely important dimension that you put your finger on here. In some ways apprenticeship points exactly at a gap that I think we are going to face in especially launching careers and setting up pathways for development.
▶ 1:52:42Sen. Rosen: Thank you. >> ranking member baldwin, Mr. giannikopoulos in the radiology world there was a prediction made by the father of a.I.. I am sure you are familiar. He said that with the rise of a.I. There would be no more need for radiologist. Someone as smart as he was was completely wrong.
▶ 1:53:10Sen. Rosen: Your company, your work proves that wrong every day. How can someone as smart on a.I. As he was originally get that sort of prediction wrong and how can we use that as wisdom for the future as we think about the application of a.I. Personally and commercially?
▶ 1:53:33Mr. Giannikopoulos: As we look at all of this transformation, it is not unique to radiology. That was a field that was early identified as potential for automation replacement. That did not work out. It is part of the way that a.I. Is trained. It is trained on this medical information generated by a radiologist through an interpretation process. That judgment cannot be replaced. There are going to be edge cases. There are going to be zebras.
▶ 1:54:06Mr. Giannikopoulos: My personal diagnostic journey, I do not fit any algorithmic assessment that would normally get to that diagnosis. Which is why we need the human directly involved. Medicine is a science and an art. Being able to put that together and synthesize it. A.I. Offers the ability for the radiologist, the clinicians to synthesize and understand more. We don't have to dig through records and all of these systems. We can see it presented in a really easy way so they can make that determination.
▶ 1:54:37Mr. Giannikopoulos: If you look at rural health care in particular, that is an area where we need to augment those institutions. In north carolina, a health specialist covers most of western north carolina right now. They serve as the safety net to make sure the patients did not have to be flown over mountains literally to get to other healthcare systems. They do that by early adoption technology. I met them 20 years ago on the documentation side.
▶ 1:55:06Mr. Giannikopoulos: At my last company they were the first in the state to adapt analysis for improvement and understanding. Now they are using new documentation tools like ours to augment that and integrate in the radiology society of north america to really speed it up. I cannot comment on how jeff got that so wrong but he did get it wrong and today, they also set self's would take over by this time too. Radiologists are still driving to work in their cars.
▶ 1:55:41Sen. Baldwin: I want to thank each of you and those who asked great questions. I think the ranking member and each of these companies and allowing time for you are to be here today. Senators will have until the close of business on march 10 to submit questions for the record. Witnesses will have until the close of business on march 24 to respond to those questions. This concludes today's hearing. The committee stands adjourned. Thank you.
▶ 1:56:16Sen. Baldwin: [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap.org]