If you own or manage a manufacturing, distribution, or warehousing facility, it’s time to get serious about artificial intelligence. The technology is slowly evolving into something that actually generates ROI. Software and hardware vendors are introducing AI technologies both standalone and as part of their existing products. Leveraging these technologies is critical to increasing productivity, reducing overhead, and increasing profits.

Here are four areas to consider.

robotics

Manufacturing and distribution companies of all sizes are investing heavily in AI-powered robot technologies for manufacturing. Walmart is rolling out autonomous forklifts controlled by AI software. Amazon is deploying hundreds of human-like warehouse robots to lift and transport packages, and autonomous drones to monitor traffic, security, and workflow. A German company called Robco is renting out robots that perform lathe work, laser engraving, and palletizing (the robots can then be refurbished and used for other customers as needed). Other robots are being used in food processing and bakeries to independently mix ingredients and then load the finished products into boxes and crates.

Some people think that humanoid robots are just for movies. But that’s not true. They are appearing more and more frequently in manufacturing – alongside and instead of workers.

For example, 1X is providing a plentiful workforce on the factory floor with safe, intelligent humanoids. Agility Robotics is producing tens of thousands of humanoid warehouse robots. Boston Dynamics is now producing an electric-powered version of its humanoid robot Atlas. Apptronik’s Apollo is a general-purpose humanoid robot designed for use in factories and offices.

Unbox Robotics offers a range of AI “swarm robots” to “accelerate package sorting and order fulfillment, enabling efficient express logistics operations that deliver a seamless end-customer experience.” United Robots produces AI-powered cleaning, disinfection and transport robots that can do everything from removing microbiological contamination to protecting workers to pulling heavy loads or carts. Other humanoid robots designed for all sorts of industrial tasks—and award-winning ones—are available now (or soon) from companies like Figure AI and Sanctuary AI.

The robots on the production floor are controlled via the cloud, using platforms from Nvidia (the chipmaker describes the new platform as “a universal base model for humanoid robots”) and the aforementioned Agility Robotics, which the company says “can, for example, command an army of robots to move containers onto a conveyor belt at a specific time.” I’m not sure I like that, but OK.

Internet of Things

Industry Week’s VG Govindarajan and Venkat Venkatraman write that smart companies like Rolls Royce are using artificial intelligence (AI) to transform yesterday’s devices into thinking, intelligent machines.

“Tractors have become ‘agricultural computers’ connected to cloud systems for precision agriculture,” they write. “Rolls-Royce offers ‘power by the hour’ contracts for its aircraft engines. This approach ensures that Rolls-Royce is responsible for the maintenance and performance of its engines, with costs linked to the hours the engines are operated.”

Companies with complex processing applications – particularly larger companies in power generation, oil and gas, chemicals, and food and beverage manufacturing – are now implementing AI platforms like UptimeAI, which use sensors to monitor, analyze, and evaluate faults or other problems that can lead to anomalies, efficiency losses, and safety issues, and raise alarms when faults, malfunctions, or other problems occur.

Other software companies and hardware manufacturers are collaborating to develop Internet of Things (IoT) sensors that use AI technology and models. The sensors are then installed on manufacturing equipment to “make the hardware smart” using audio, video, image, temperature and pressure sensors.

3D manufacturing

Several companies – including Fathom Digital Manufacturing, Protolabs and Stratasys – are using AI to create 3D printing solutions to “drastically accelerate” the product development cycle, allowing manufacturers to design, build, test and evaluate prototypes “in days instead of weeks or months”.

Consolidation of data in large language models

For AI to work, large databases of different information must be built.

A company called EthonAI has launched a new software platform that it says will “give managers and engineers a ‘sixth sense’ to more accurately track what’s happening in their factories.” The platform combines data from multiple sources and then uses artificial intelligence to create recommendations for management.

“With AI tools, companies can more easily identify patterns that lead to poor quality products and implement changes quickly,” writes Rae Hartley Beck. “When a larger percentage of final products pass quality control, less waste is created and more value is created for companies.”

Another company bringing data under one roof – Sight Machine – recently announced a partnership with Siemens AG to create a manufacturing data platform that can collect, contextualize and analyze all types of manufacturing data to improve production. Sight Machine’s software “analyzes the entire history of production runs to determine the best settings for current conditions.”

Microsoft has announced a series of initiatives to bring data under one roof using “copilot templates” so customers can “build their own copilots.” The idea is that employees will use natural language queries to pull data – for example, asking the big language model why a machine is breaking – and get insights that help solve the problems faster.

Manufacturers are reportedly investing in internal AI applications to improve production planning, minimize line downtime, test chemical blends, reconcile data from multiple sources to better communicate with suppliers and customers, and source materials globally based on real-time availability to reduce supply chain bottlenecks.

In the back office, cloud computing platform ServiceNow has released financial, customer service and operations software specifically designed for manufacturers that uses AI to do things like automatically recommend spare parts for customer maintenance, automatically manage customer exceptions, autonomously communicate with suppliers and log an issue and deploy a field engineer with the knowledge, skills and equipment needed to get the job done. Other manufacturing software makers such as Epicor, SAP and Sage are rolling out similar AI-based features.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in November 2022. It sparked a flurry of activity, triggered a flood of investment, spawned countless startups, and forced every software and hardware company to double down on their AI offerings. Less than two years later, manufacturers are now starting to see the results of those efforts. And we’re just getting started.