AI and Robots: Not What You Think

There's a lot of excitement about what artificial intelligence (AI) can do in manufacturing. Depending on what you read – and choose to believe about what you read – AI-driven robots are able to autonomously make decisions about what work gets done, how it gets done and who does it or there are decades of work yet to be done before we see a material impact. Personally, I think we're somewhere in the middle, as manufacturers – pragmatists that they are – design and implement manufacturing strategies in a very deliberate way to achieve business requirements and then focus ongoing efforts to make key processes better and better. And I think that collaborative robots (cobots) will play a larger and larger role in accelerating progress. The AI that cobots possess makes them so much more than just machines for dirty, dull and dangerous work.