Physical AI enabled by the merger of IoT and AI is set to transform all our industries, according to high-level speakers at Advantech’s Edge AI conference on the eve of last week’s Computex show in Taipei.

“Physical AI is being adopted across industries such as factories, medical, retail, energy, robotics and farming,” said Miller Chang, president of Advantech’s embedded sector. “In addition to robotics, there are more and more industrial applications for edge AI. It is transforming our industries.”

But he said this was a job not for one company but for a whole ecosystem. However, this transformation has to live with the legacy of what already exists.

“In the real world with physical AI, there isn’t going to be a human in the loop,” said Deepu Talla, vice president at Nvidia (www.nvidia.com). “That is the problem we have to solve; once this technology becomes accurate enough, it will integrate into real processes that already exist. There are many protocols and PLCs that have existed for 30 to 40 years. Integrating with these will be extremely difficult.”

Miroslaw Ryba from Deloitte (www.deloitte.com) said deploying AI on processes that were developed before AI would this year alone lead to nearly half of all AI projects failing.

And before integration even starts, the equipment has to be tested to ensure it is safe and accurate enough, and that testing will involve simulation.

“That means we have to generate data,” said Talla. “We have to train the models before we deploy them. And these robots will be operating for ten to 15 years during which time they will become more intelligent.”

Advances in AI are allowing this to happen, he said.

“Before Chat GPT, AI was for specific jobs,” he said. “It only worked for one scenario and it didn’t adapt to new situations. Chat GPT has moved AI into a general model. You can then create specialities from the general model.”

Nakul Duggal, executive vice president at Qualcomm (www.qualcomm.com), said the world was at the beginning of what will be an interesting decade of change. The rate of change will be different across industries but it will touch all our lives.

And Dan Rodriguez, corporate vice president at Intel (www.intel.com), added: “We are all excited about physical AI and robotics.”

Advantech’s COO Linda Tsai summed it up by saying: “AI has fundamentally changed over the past 18 months. AI is evolving so quickly, everything is possible.”

She also said Advantech was expanding its manufacturing capabilities rapidly and the industrial AI products it was selling were tried out in its own factories first.

“We implement everything in our factories first,” she said. “Using AI with robotics is increasing our production. We also use AI in engineering because we want to increase our design quality.”

The company unveiled plans for additional manufacturing plants in Taiwan and Japan by 2028 and an additional facility in China by 2031. This year, it will also open a service centre is Tustin, California.

Though its existing factories in China and Taiwan use the same processes, anything that is shipped to the USA has to be made in its Taiwanese factories, she said, because of requests for no Chinese-made products.

The company is taking cyber-security generally very seriously and last year set up a framework to ensure its products complied. Chang said by next year all the firm’s products would meet the EU CRA if a customer wanted that. But he admitted meeting different requirements could be a problem, but said the goal was to ensure that operationally they were the same.

“If we make a product in Taiwan, it can be hard to make it for every region,” he said. “The USA may not want a camera module made in China. In China, they may insist it comes from China. Europe might want a local module. What we try to do is make sure the interface is the same whatever module they are using.”

As to the reasoning behind the US service centre, Tsai said: “A lot of US companies need a lot more integration. They need special configurations for specific customers, so we need to do that regionally.”

Advantech (www.advantech.com) at the moment does not have its own manufacturing in the USA but uses a contract manufacturer.