FOX Business correspondent Lydia Hu has the latest on jobs at risk as AI further develops on'America's Newsroom.' Tesla CEO Elon Musk often refers to the automobile factory as "the machine that builds the machine," but there are plenty of human workers involved in even the most highly automated plants. They remain a key part of the exceedingly complex process that is automobile assembly but need to operate as efficiently as their mechanical counterparts to keep cars and trucks coming off the line with a combination of quality and speed. Weeding out issues and making sure everything is running smoothly has traditionally meant sending quality control personnel up and down the lines to get eyes on the action. WHAT ARE THE FOUR MAIN TYPES OF AI? Palo Alto-based Invisible AI was founded by veterans of the autonomous car industry who saw an alternative for the artificial intelligence-driven machine vision technology they were working on that could come to market long before the mass acceptance of self-driving cars.

The rise of so-called "smart factory" technologies is leading to a race to modernize manufacturing plant and warehouse floors. Old equipment is being replaced by newer, more advanced machinery as manufacturers look to keep pace with the competition -- and wrestle with high turnover rates. According to a survey by Plex Systems, 50% of manufacturers accelerated their adoption of automation and digital systems during the pandemic. A separate report from The Harris Poll, commissioned by Google, found that two-thirds of manufacturers were using AI in their day-to-day operations as of June 2021. Take those numbers with a grain of salt -- they're not from impartial sources, after all.

Toyota Motor North America (TMNA) is partnering with Invisible AI to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) in its factories to enhance efficiency and safety. The computer vision platform of the Texas-based company will be installed in 14 Toyota factories in North America. The AI will analyze manufacturing operations to detect any technical issues, revealing the invisible problems to the human eye and cameras and fixing them to improve processes' quality and safety. According to Forbes, Toyota aims to apply computer vision technology to accurately review the assembly process and reduce the time to find inefficiencies. Under the two-year agreement, Toyota factories will be equipped with a system consisting of 500 AI devices using NVIDIA processors and a high-resolution 3D camera to observe operations.

"Assembly" may sound like one of the simpler tests in the manufacturing process, but as anyone who's ever put together a piece of flat-pack furniture knows, it can be surprisingly (and frustratingly) complex. Invisible AI is a startup that aims to monitor people doing assembly tasks using computer vision, helping maintain safety and efficiency -- without succumbing to the obvious all-seeing-eye pitfalls. A $3.6 million seed round ought to help get them going. The company makes self-contained camera-computer units that run highly optimized computer vision algorithms to track the movements of the people they see. By comparing those movements with a set of canonical ones (someone performing the task correctly), the system can watch for mistakes or identify other problems in the workflow -- missing parts, injuries and so on.

AI became a ubiquitous buzzword in 2017, but the promised rise of the machines has thus far failed to materialise. Despite the buzz, real-world use cases have remained somewhat limited, but this looks set to change in 2018. Companies are already ploughing cash into AI, but much of this investment is yet to reap rewards. According to research firm Forrester, 55 percent of firms have not yet achieved any tangible business outcomes from AI, and 43 percent of them say it's too soon to say whether their investment has been a success. "There's been a lot of pilots and a lot of proof of concepts, but the reality is not only what AI is and what AI can do, but also what is required to build these new intelligent systems is starting to be realised," says Michele Goetz, one of the authors of a Forrester report titled The Honeymoon For AI Is Over.

Across sectors, startups are seeking out talent with AI expertise to analyse consumer data and offer personalised services to users. Meanwhile, global giants such as Apple have taken notice of Indian companies that help clients with data processing and image and voice recognition, and investors, too, are backing Indian AI startups. Here's how some of India's unicorns – companies valued at more than $1 billion – are putting these technologies to use. From being an e-wallet to selling movie or flight tickets, Paytm now delivers a diverse range of services and machine learning helps bring order to that chaos. "You could Google and try to look for something. But a better world would be when Google could on its own figure out Charu is looking for'x' at this time. That's exactly what we're doing at Paytm," the company's chief technology officer, Charumitra Pujari, who came to Paytm after working with the e-retail giant Amazon for nearly two years, said.

Across sectors, startups are seeking out talent with AI expertise to analyse consumer data and offer personalised services to users. Meanwhile, global giants such as Apple have taken notice of Indian companies that help clients with data processing and image and voice recognition, and investors, too, are backing Indian AI startups. Here's how some of India's unicorns--companies valued at more than $1 billion--are putting these technologies to use. From being an e-wallet to selling movie or flight tickets, Paytm now delivers a diverse range of services and machine learning helps bring order to that chaos. "You could Google and try to look for something. But a better world would be when Google could on its own figure out Charu is looking for'x' at this time. That's exactly what we're doing at Paytm," the company's chief technology officer, Charumitra Pujari, who came to Paytm after working with the e-retail giant Amazon for nearly two years, said.