Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

AI on Factory Floor: Robots & Back Office Automation

9 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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1:04

In this brief dialogue, two speakers explore how AI is applied in large manufacturing organizations. Speaker B explains that physical robots are already deployed on the plant floor to perform pick‑and‑place and assembly tasks, and that employees have been re‑skilled to manage these machines. However, the same companies often lag in automating back‑office functions. The conversation contrasts physical robotic automation with software‑based robotic process automation (RPA) that mimics human computer tasks such as bank reconciliations and transfers, highlighting the need for balanced digital transformation across both front‑line and support roles.

Chapters

Do you see AI applications mostly helping those in support roles in manufacturing, or do you see the AI also being able to help those who are on the, the plant floor?
I think it's a combination of those things. And if you look at some really large manufacturing organizations, they've already embraced things like robotic process automation, where on the manufacturing floor they've got robots that are doing some of the work, right? And they've retooled the skillset of the employees to manage those robots. On the manufacturing line. But I do think even folks that have embraced it on the manufacturing floor, they sort of let their back office fall behind. And the difference between robotic process automation in this scenario is you have a large robot on the floor that's actually picking things up and putting things down and helping build something, where robotic process automation in the back office is more software, right? And so It, it can mimic tasks that a person can do on a computer. Things like a bank reconciliation, as an example, or transfers.