Collaboration, Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality Enable Purchasing X.0

Intelligent products and the associated value creation form the basis for employment and prosperity in modern industrial societies. A central challenge lies in managing the increasing product and process complexity due to the far-reaching effects of several factors such as globalization, customer orientation, shortened product life cycles, and growing market dynamics. Due to the profound digital transformation in development, production, and distribution, it is conceivable that a company, in extreme cases, consists only of the purchasing department and buys numerous associated services. Through a novel use, external development partners can take over the tasks of a company, including collaboration with the developers of its suppliers. Production and transport capacities can largely be procured to bring in knowledge of transport planning. The basic prerequisite for this is the presence of flexible value chains with intelligent, cross-company, real-time available information and collaborative services. This chapter addresses under the term “Practical AI in extended Reality (xAIR)” three fundamental technological aspects that can play an important role here in interaction and which are explained in their current and future possibilities: Mixed Reality (MR), methods of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Differentiated considerations should allow the reader to classify these aspects based on sound background knowledge, identify potential use cases, and better assess possible consequences.