AR-AI Tools as a Response to High Employee Turnover and Shortages in Manufacturing during Regular, Pandemic, and War Times.

The world faces the continuously increasing issue of a lack of skilled employees, staff migration, and turnover. It is strengthened by unexpected situations such as wars, pandemics, and other civilization crises. Solutions are sought and researched in various branches of industry and academia, including engineering, social sciences, management, and political and computer sciences. From the viewpoint of this paper, this is a side topic of Industry 4.0 and, more specifically, sustainability in working environments, and the issue is related to production employees who perform manual operations. Some of the tasks cannot be carried out under robotization or automation; therefore, novel human-work support tools are expected. This paper presents such highly demanded support tools related to augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI). First, a panoramic literature review is given. Secondly, the authors explain the main objective of the presented contribution. Then the authors' achievements are described—the R&D focus on such solutions and the introduction of the developed tools that are based on AR and AI. Benefits connected to the AR-AI technology applications are presented in terms of both time savings with the tool usage and job simplification, enabling inexperienced, unskilled, or less skilled employees to perform the work in the selected manual production processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]