On a metallic door in San Francisco's Mission District, a single character--"π"--offers a cryptic clue as to the virtuous circle of labor taking place beyond. The door opens to reveal furious activity involving both humans and machines. A woman uses two joysticks to operate a pair of tabletop robotic arms that carefully lift and fold T-shirts into a neat pile. Several larger robots move pantry items from one cluttered box to another. In one corner of the room a man operates a plastic pincer that fits over his wrist and has a webcam on top.

As 2023 kicks off, the industrial transformation continues to accelerate with automation, artificial intelligence and edge-cloud platforms at the core. From production and supply chains to fleet and logistics, companies are leveraging technology to become data-driven. On January 17, Samsara -- a US-based industrial IoT cloud operations provider with over 15,000 core customers -- brought together a group of experts for a virtual panel. The panel discussed 2023 IIoT predictions, C-suite executives' priorities and tech investments. Experts agreed that AI and automation would be big disruptors, increasing safety, efficiency and sustainability.

Late last week, Google research scientist Fei Xia sat in the center of a bright, open-plan kitchen and typed a command into a laptop connected to a one-armed, wheeled robot resembling a large floor lamp. The robot promptly zoomed over to a nearby countertop, gingerly picked up a bag of multigrain chips with a large plastic pincer, and wheeled over to Xia to offer up a snack. The most impressive thing about that demonstration, held in Google's robotics lab in Mountain View, California, was that no human coder had programmed the robot to understand what to do in response to Xia's command. Its control software had learned how to translate a spoken phrase into a sequence of physical actions using millions of pages of text scraped from the web. That means a person doesn't have to use specific preapproved wording to issue commands, as can be necessary with virtual assistants such as Alexa or Siri.

Late last week, Google research scientist Fei Xia sat in the center of a bright, open-plan kitchen and typed a command into a laptop connected to a one-armed, wheeled robot resembling a large floor lamp. The robot promptly zoomed over to a nearby countertop, gingerly picked up a bag of multigrain chips with a large plastic pincer, and wheeled over to Xia to offer up a snack. The most impressive thing about that demonstration, held in Google's robotics lab in Mountain View, California, was that no human coder had programmed the robot to understand what to do in response to Xia's command. Its control software had learned how to translate a spoken phrase into a sequence of physical actions using millions of pages of text scraped from the web. That means a person doesn't have to use specific preapproved wording to issue commands, as can be necessary with virtual assistants such as Alexa or Siri.

Agencies that want to incorporate artificial intelligence into their apps can take advantage of the five different categories of Cognitive Services now available on Microsoft's Azure Government Cloud. With the application programming interfaces and software development kits in Microsoft Cognitive Services, agencies can add emotion and video detection; facial, speech and vision recognition; and speech and language understanding to applications. To help agencies serve constituents with hearing disabilities, for example, an API can convert speech to text, help identify speakers and understand the intent in the tone of their voices. Language apps can provide multilingual services that help governments respond interactively to citizen requests, and knowledge and search apps can be used by bots or virtual assistants to access data from the web to answer questions. Chatbots or virtual assistants have piqued the interest of agencies that want to use them to respond to constituent requests 24 hours a day, lessening the burden on call centers that answer many of the same questions.