(Joshua Widawsky, Program Manager at USC’s Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing, left, and Tim Hess, Industry 4.0 Engineer Manager at Integer Technologies. Photo courtesy of Integer Technologies and The Pierson Collective.) 

The green and brown cotton fields of Clarendon County may seem like a strange place for artificial intelligence, but that’s something Joe Maja is working to change. The South Carolina State University researcher is exploring ways that AI can help small farmers in the Palmetto State save time and money — through mechanisms like automated precision robotic sprayers, which use a fraction of the defoliant that cotton farmers typically employ.

“One hundred percent is what the normal farmer does — they just spray,” said Maja, director of S.C. State’s Center of Applied Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Agriculture. “We use artificial intelligence to pinpoint exactly what percentage they need so the quality of the cotton won’t be changed. And the artificial intelligence has pinpointed that they don’t need 100 percent — they just need 40 percent. Can you imagine what that would save the farmer? He doesn’t need to spend that much to spray the whole field, and can still generate the same quality that he wants.”

It may still be a while before armies of AI sprayers are working agricultural fields throughout the state. But the AI revolution is already underway, with the technology being employed to improve efficiency and production in industries throughout South Carolina. Manufacturers are exploring AI as a means of reducing costs and fine-tuning production schedules. Startups using AI — to give music lessons, run business analytics, customize digital interfaces for users with disabilities, offer personalized investment options, and much more — are popping up around the state, particularly in the Charleston and Greenville areas.

The Charleston Regional Development Alliance recently announced a five-year plan to augment the Lowcountry’s current manufacturing-based economy with an emphasis on technology and innovation, with AI clearly playing a part in that process. The city of Florence even has an AI-powered chatbot named Cypress — “Cy,” for short — which answers basic questions and provides information on the city’s website.

“I think AI in South Carolina has an incredible future,” said Josh Knight, cofounder and chief operating officer of Integer Technologies, a Columbia-based company which since 2021 has used AI-driven technology to help improve human decision-making, in particular for the U.S. Department of Defense.

“You have universities like the University of South Carolina, who we partner with regularly, which are producing incredibly talented STEM graduates primed and eager to go after these kinds of AI frontiers. And you also have a state which is a manufacturing state at heart — huge activities in automotive and other industrial sectors that are ripe for AI. I think that's why you're going to see a lot of action in South Carolina related to AI, because of all the opportunities to use AI to improve these kinds of manufacturers’ outcomes.”

Entering a new era

In some ways, that’s already happening. Giuliano Marodin, an operations and supply chain professor at USC’s Darla Moore School of Business, is involved with two student-led consulting projects involving AI — one creating a cost-regression model for the automotive technology company Schaeffler, and another examining production for Continental Tire. Both companies have their U.S. headquarters in Fort Mill.

The Schaeffler project involves using AI to predict the price of certain components, potentially allowing the company to negotiate more favorable deals with its supplier. The Continental project involves using AI to predict how many tires the company can manufacturer given certain conditions. Ideally, both projects if successful would become something the companies would use going forward.

“That’s the goal,” Marodin said. “There are about seven different components inside a tire, and depending what type of tire (Continental) is producing, those components are different. So we're trying to find what is the best way to schedule their production in order to produce more tires. And for Schaeffler, we're testing how different solutions can improve the way that they forecast the price of the items that they're purchasing.”

Indeed, South Carolina’s manufacturing and distribution sectors seem ready-made for the type of efficiencies that AI technology can bring. A recent survey from the AI firm Hyperscience found that 70 percent of respondents in back-office supply chain roles were willing or very willing to invest in AI systems, and 98 percent of respondents who use the technology see it as useful or important.

“Manufacturing has entered a new era,” Yannick Haeck, vice president for product at the software firm Poka, wrote recently in American Machinist. “It’s no longer dirty, dangerous, and dull, and there are no excuses for substandard performance or results. Automation, digitalization, and Generative Artificial Intelligence have helped raise operating standards and establish a new atmosphere for traditional manufacturing.”

That’s becoming the case in South Carolina as well. In late 2024, BMW’s Spartanburg plant began testing AI-powered humanoid robots made by Figure AI, which autonomously perform a variety of human-like tasks requiring precision, manipulations, complex gripping and two-handed coordination. Volvo is adding an AI-driven LiDAR (light detection and ranging) safety system to its fully electric EX90, which is manufactured outside Charleston.

“Companies are trying to use it more and more, and that's something that you're going to see continue,” Marodin said. “It's maybe not going to be a part of every day, like every hour, every minute. But it's starting to be in that experience phase where they're looking and learning from these tools.”

‘We could be the easy button’

Of course, not all Palmetto State compares that use AI are manufacturing giants. Based in Mount Pleasant, LCIX began as a niche publisher of high-quality, full-color books and periodicals. Founders Casey Bearsch and Daniel Bradley soon grasped that the same AI tool they were using to streamline distribution of those periodicals could apply to just about anything else.

“We quickly realized, why are we only doing this for books? And that’s how DistroLogic came to be,” Bearsch said, referring to LCIX’s AI product. “We’d developed this middleware platform to integrate with marketplaces, and were using predictive analytics to make sure that we had the proper stock inventory against demand surges. It didn't matter what the product was — if we could do this for one product, why don't we just enable and help every manufacturer that's making some product somewhere and wants to get it to some marketplace easily? Not to steal a phrase from Staples, but we realized we could be the easy button.”

LCIX has begun onboarding what Bearsch calls “artisan manufacturers” — a maker of fine-knit alpaca throws in Ecuador, a leather worker in Kenya, an electronics company in the United Kingdom. “If they are committed to making their products better and producing their product in a consistent manner, that's where we come in,” Bearsch said. “We can actually show them how to get in as many marketplaces as they want, scale it very quickly, and get it there within three days, which is very enticing to the consumer. Our system facilitates that.”

Integer Technologies has clearly discovered a niche for AI. The company co-founded by Knight and CEO Duke Hartman identifies technology gaps within the Department of Defense, then works with university partners to get solutions from university labs into the hands of servicemen. Integer is among the fastest-growing companies in South Carolina, with an annual economic impact on the state that reached $63 million in 2024 and is expected to exceed $112 million annually by 2030.

“We're providing AI that enables military and commercial customers to basically make better decisions faster at the highest level. That's what it about,” Knight said. “We're seeing a lot of folks who need new tools and new ways to make better decisions faster. AI is one of the key ingredients to unlocking that, and it's been part of Integer from the very beginning.”

Known primarily for its defense work, Integer crafts AI products that can direct unmanned surface vessels and create intelligent energy management systems, among other uses. The company is applying those same principals to advanced manufacturing, where it aims to improve the speed and quality of fabrication systems. Knight added that an expansion of Integer’s user base for AI products is forthcoming.

“Ultimately the AI that we're developing, whether it's for unmanned systems or energy management or (other) types of applications, is for critical assets and helping operators get more performance out of those assets,” Knight said. “If you're a warfighter, we're using AI to help you coordinate swarms of unmanned systems, for example. Or if you're a manufacturer, we're helping you use AI to get more production and more scale out of your factories. So we are working in a couple of different application areas, but at a high level, these are all critical systems that rely on getting more output.”

Operating at machine speed

AI is not new — British mathematician Alan Turing wondered in the 1950s if machines were capable of thought, and early chatbots were introduced in the 1980s, according to IBM. But recent advances in computing have made it so anyone with a smartphone can have AI in the palm of their hand, and the generative form of the technology can “learn” based on the data it’s trained on.

“Looking back, you can’t remember how you lived without your smartphone. Looking back, you can’t remember how you lived without the internet,” Roger Park, global innovation leader at Ernst & Young, said at a recent event rolling out CRDA’s tech-heavy vision for the Lowcountry’s economic future. “That’s how it’s going to be with generative AI.”

What does that mean for South Carolina? More and more students studying AI at USC, for starters. “We have a pipeline of maybe half dozen classes that are about AI in different disciplines,” Marodin said. “It's being incorporated in our classes, and then it's going into the minds of students, and they’ll be ready to use it when they get to the job market. I think we have great potential of using that very talented workforce to provide for those companies that are coming here or growing in South Carolina.”

AI is not about letting the machines do the work — put all those HAL 9000 nightmares aside, for now — as much as it is providing decision-making humans with more bits of information and more alternatives than they could ever muster on their own. Even the AI-powered robots being tested at BMW are designed to support “plant employees performing ergonomically awkward and exhausting tasks to take the strain off them,” according to a November news release.

“What we're working on is helping, essentially, systems be more effective together with humans,” said Integer’s Knight. “And oftentimes that means helping the human to operate at closer to the speeds that the machines can operate. The AI systems that we're providing are helping them to process a lot more information and aid them in coming to a better decision, a lot faster than they would without that AI.”

The AI revolution isn’t without its risks — chief among them cybersecurity, as fraudsters use AI to polish their messages. “There’s been a 700 percent increase in deepfakes in the financial sector alone. So how do you know that you’re speaking to the right person?” Arnab Bose, chief product officer for the identity management company Okta, said on a recent McKinsey podcast. Stu Bradley, senior VP of risk for the analytics platform SAS, took it a step further: “We are entering the Dark Age of Fraud,” he said in a 2023 company release.

Even from the cotton field in Clarendon County, Maja can see the pros and cons. “We’re probably just on the tip of a big thing that’s going to happen,” said the S.C. State professor. But then he looks at the drones he utilizes for agricultural research, and how that once-innocuous technology has become a weapon of war. Is that what the future holds for artificial intelligence as well?  

“We know it can bring lots of good things, lots of benefits, especially for farmers. But this technology can also be used for bad things,” Maja added. “I mean, I remember when drones came in 10 years ago, and there was a lot of potential for how they could be used. But obviously now, a drone can be used for something like what’s happening in Ukraine.”