Artificial intelligence (AI) has reshaped and continues to reshape how industries do business, approach challenges, optimise operations, and innovate. With a capable and reliable system integrator, you can align emerging technologies with your business goals and use AI in just about anything.
AI solutions are driving change in manufacturing and retail. In these industries, AI has unique applications that streamline processes, improving outcomes and boosting efficiency.
Powering Smarter Operations in Manufacturing
Manufacturing has long embraced automation—e.g., robotic process automation, enterprise resource planning, etc.—but AI takes it further with predictive, adaptive, and precise AI-powered solutions. Here’s where AI is making the biggest impact in manufacturing:
Predictive Maintenance
Preventive maintenance has always been a critical business process that shop floor managers swear by to minimise downtime and ensure continuous and on-time production—both crucial to meeting production quotas and deadlines.
Artificial intelligence improves this, changing preventive to predictive so you have downtime only when it’s strictly necessary but don’t leave it too late that the equipment breaks down, becoming a harder fix or even requiring a replacement.
With AI, your equipment (technically sensors linked to your equipment or algorithms trained in your data) tells you when it’s about to malfunction, maybe even letting you know exactly where the problem lies so a precise correction can be applied.
This is what AI, as well as machine learning and data analytics, enabled for Shell’s Perdido oil platform. For ten years, the offshore facility would intermittently lose production due to contamination when underwater pumps failed to separate oil and gas.
After modelling decades of sensor data, Shell data analysts discovered a chemical signature that would typically show up shortly before the pumps failed. That became the signal that the pumps needed maintenance, saving them from wasted or lost production.
Quality Control
Human error is a production line’s worst enemy. AI-powered computer vision systems are stepping in to eliminate it.
BMW, for instance, employs machine vision and artificial intelligence software to inspect products and scrutinise parts. Its quality control AI is self-learning, self-training, and self-adjusting, allowing for complete autonomy from human supervision.
This system ensures the company’s high standards are maintained, preserving brand reputation, without requiring lengthy and resource-intensive double-checking procedures by human inspectors.
Inventory Optimisation
Forget the chaos (and storage costs) of overstocked warehouses or last-minute material shortages (and their associated opportunity costs). AI can predict your material requirements with precision.
Toyota has integrated AI into its supply chain, allowing artificial intelligence to suggest optimisation improvements. In inventory management, in particular, Toyota’s AI solution can forecast demand and identify cost-saving opportunities.
Process Automation
Repetitive tasks like assembly and packaging can drain human energy, dull the faculties, and increase errors. AI-driven robotics, such as Amazon’s sorting arms—the palletiser/depalletiser—are an excellent innovation that can handle monotonous processes with unrelenting speed and accuracy.
Whether assembling car parts or packaging goods for shipping, AI-powered robots can become your factory’s thinking, learning, tireless, and error-free workforce.
Elevating Customer Experiences in Retail
AI automates business processes but, more importantly in retail, it enables delightful and personalised customer experiences. The following are a few of the ways AI is doing this:
Customer Behaviour Prediction
Ever wonder how Amazon seems to know what you’ll buy next? AI algorithms track customer purchasing habits, and using big data analysis, they predict and recommend what you might like to look at next.
This makes shopping experiences feel much more personal and satisfying, as Amazon’s AI-powered recommendation engine makes it easier to find things you might like to buy. It is so effective that it drives over a third of Amazon’s sales.
Dynamic Pricing
Pricing is an art, and AI makes it dynamic and precise. Airlines like Delta constantly adjust ticket prices based on demand, competition, and inventory levels. Add AI to this mix, and the result is competitive fares that reflect real-time market conditions while maximising profits.
Through AI-assisted pricing, Delta can make quick and on-the-spot pricing decisions, such as offering personalised upgrades to individual passengers. The price is logical and based on all the factors that must be considered, including a passenger’s purchase history with the airline and the likelihood of generating future sales.
Inventory Management
Nobody likes empty shelves; you lose out on potential sales when you’re understocked. That said, nobody likes overcrowded stockrooms, either. Unsold inventory is sleeping money, tying up your capital, and even increasing your carrying and stocking costs.
On your part, AI can help you predict demand, allowing you to adjust your order timing and quantities, which in turn translates to reduced risks (and costs) of overstocking and stockouts.
In-Store Experience
Physical shops are not dead but evolving instead. Yes, it’s so much easier to buy and find things online, but there’s something about fitting clothes or trying lipstick in person, as well as buying something you can touch and feel and immediately take home that helps maintain the allure of brick-and-mortar stores.
If you can make in-person shopping magical, you don’t have to worry about competing with online shops. AI can help you accomplish this, just like AI-powered virtual mirrors are letting Sephora’s customers try on makeup digitally, making shopping faster, easier, and more enjoyable while increasing potential sales.
The Bigger Picture of AI Transformation
AI’s impact on manufacturing and retail is undeniable. From the production lines in factories to the aisles of your favourite store, AI is influencing and changing the way you shop and work through intelligent solutions that work harder, act faster and deliver better results.
When combined with a robust security infrastructure solution to safeguard sensitive data, AI can be the key to businesses growing, scaling, and unlocking their full potential.
