AI leaves the hard hat and enters the kiln
For years, AI in heavy industry has been confined to peripheral tasks. Cameras checking whether workers are wearing PPE. Drones surveying stockpiles. Sensors flagging equipment anomalies. Useful, but marginal. The production processes themselves, the furnaces, kilns, and chemical reactions at the core of manufacturing, remained under manual or rule-based control.
At Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona, Huawei presented evidence that this is changing.
Charles Li, President of Huawei's Chemical & Building Materials Business Unit, described the shift directly: "The biggest change now is that AI is moving from a supporting role to a leading role, truly penetrating core production systems."
The headline case study is Conch Cement, the world's largest single-brand cement producer with annual capacity exceeding 400 million tonnes. Huawei and Conch have deployed an AI optimisation solution that analyses more than 100 production parameters in real time to control free calcium range during calcination, the most energy-intensive stage of cement production, accounting for roughly 50% of total production costs.
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