The journey toward AI-enabled railway companies

Today, railway companies have the potential, and the opportunity, to harness the power of rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to improve the ways they plan and deliver services.

AI capabilities have accelerated due to three forces over the past few decades: tumbling costs of data storage and processing, rapidly expanding data availability, and improved data storage and modelling techniques. Generative AI (gen AI) in particular has been building momentum since 2017 and hit an inflection point at the end of 2022 when applications such as ChatGPT became 

publicly available. 

It’s no surprise then that AI adoption has surged across industries. In 2023, McKinsey’s annual global survey on the state of AI revealed that one-third of respondents said their organizations regularly use gen AI in at least one business function, and 60 percent of organizations that have adopted AI are also using gen AI. Additionally, 

40 percent of those reporting AI adoption at their organizations say their companies expect to invest more in AI because of advances in gen AI.