AI on the factory floor, without the slideware
Vision inspection has quietly become normal equipment. Predictive maintenance works where the sensors already existed. Almost everything sold as a generative shop-floor assistant is still a pilot with a budget line and no owner.
What's genuinely in production
Visual inspection is the one use case where the sector has stopped arguing. Weld seams, surface finish, label placement, fill levels — a camera, a few thousand labelled examples and an integrator, typically €60,000–€150,000 for the first cell and a third of that for each cell after. Every plant we spoke to that got past the pilot got there by starting with a defect they already measured manually.
Predictive maintenance pays where the instrumentation predates the project. Trellis Foundry had eight years of thermocouple logs and got four days of warning on liner failures out of it. The plants that started by installing sensors are, without exception, still in pilot.
Document retrieval on machine manuals, SOPs and changeover sheets is the quiet winner of the last year. It is cheap, it needs no new hardware, and the benefit shows up as shift-leader time rather than a line on the P&L — which is also why it is hard to get funded.
What's still pilot theatre
Generative process optimisation. Several vendors will sell you a model that proposes machine settings. We have not found one plant running those proposals unattended, and two that quietly reverted to the old parameter tables.
Autonomous scheduling. Two attempts documented, both abandoned, both because the plant's real constraints lived in people's heads rather than in the ERP. The model was fine. The data was fiction.
Vendors that keep appearing
| Vision-suite platforms | appear in 9 of 14 deployments |
| Local system integrators | the actual determinant of success |
| PLC-vendor AI modules | where the control layer decides |
| In-house Python + OpenCV | still common under 300 staff |
Regulation coming
The EU AI Act's high-risk obligations reach safety components of machinery from August 2027. If your vision model can stop a line or pass a part, budget for conformity documentation now — three of the plants we spoke to have started, none have finished.