Most of the conversation surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) tends to focus on its role as a digital assistant. And indeed, agentic AI has already proved itself quite capable in providing information and streamlining many digital tasks.
But when AI is applied to physical spaces, its potential becomes even bigger. Robotics already has a fairly lengthy history in physical automation, but in many instances, robotics alone is not enough.
Smart AI applications that have an impact on real-world physical activities help facilitate a wide range of solutions that can have a real, meaningful impact.
1. Effective quality assurance
Manufacturing may not always seem like an obvious choice for AI, but this industry has been one of the top early adopters of the tech.
In fact, Quality Magazine reports that in 2024, 63% of manufacturing companies were already using AI for their quality control processes.
The reasons for this are clear. Even a relatively small defect can cause major problems for the end user. Minor defects result in losses when an item is returned and replaced, but major recalls can cause billions of dollars in losses for a company.
AI image recognition and analysis can help counteract these risks by evaluating finished products at a higher level of detail than humans can.
As a highly repetitive task, this is a process that is easy to turn over to AI so that human manufacturing experts can focus on other tasks instead.
2. Turning predictive maintenance into a superpower
Unplanned downtime, from equipment breakdowns, for example, can cost manufacturing facilities a whopping US$260,000 (RM1.05mil) per hour – and upwards of US$2mil (RM8.13mil) per hour for automotive plants. Manufacturing facilities have previously needed to rely on fixed maintenance schedules. However, in high-use environments, these schedules aren’t always accurate.
As IBM highlights, however, AI can drastically alter this picture through the use of data analytics and connected sensors. These sensors allow the AI to constantly monitor the performance and condition of various manufacturing components.
Rather than performing maintenance on a set calendar, maintenance teams can do the work based on the AI’s alerts. In addition to correcting issues before a breakdown occurs, this can also help teams save time and money by avoiding unnecessary maintenance.
3. Powering robotics responses
AI has often been praised for its ability to detect issues and insights that humans can’t. But often, that’s where AI’s impact ends, because humans are still needed to carry out the actual work. In some industries, such as health care, the delays from when AI detects an issue to when it is addressed can still cause problems.
However, as AI begins to be used to coordinate automated robotics responses, this changes. Shyld uses AI not only to detect contamination events in hospitals, but to automatically provide targeted UV-C disinfection to the contaminated area as well.
Rather than waiting on a manual response after human hospital workers get an incident alert, disinfection occurs almost instantly, greatly reducing the risk of contamination.
4. Smarter inventory management
Even though the back-end focus may be digital, using AI to improve inventory management can have a powerful real-world impact. When businesses use AI-powered predictive analytics for inventory management, they’re able to optimise their stock of each product to prevent waste from unsold inventory.
After all, reducing unsold inventory isn’t just about mitigating financial losses for companies. It also keeps unsold items that might not be recyclable from ending up in landfills. It ensures raw materials aren’t wasted on products that won’t get used.
AI-powered inventory management can also help teams optimise shipments of both raw materials and finished goods, enabling them to reduce the emissions associated with their supply chain.
5. Improving physical security
The security guard falling asleep instead of monitoring a camera feed or looking away at the wrong second is a common trope in movies and TV. While such incidents can help make for good television, they don’t make for good security – both for responding to incidents in real-time and for evaluating what happened after the fact.
The introduction of AI agents to security camera systems is greatly improving the effectiveness of these solutions. Yahoo Finance offers the example of Ambient.ai, which uses AI agents to scan video streams and automatically surface relevant events for human review, allowing human operators to look for specific incidents via semantic search and more. Faster and more efficient processes can help teams better identify and resolve incidents.
Bringing AI to the real world
AI is undeniably powerful for digital tasks ranging from basic automation to knowledge preservation. But its real-world use cases may be even more important for everyday people. As these real-world applications of AI begin to take hold across various industries, AI’s true power and impact will be felt at a much larger scale. – Inc./Tribune News Service
