AI Is Coming for Elevator Inspectors' Jobs

Elevator inspectors in Japan may soon receive instructions from AI, thanks to an interesting plan involving Nvidia and Hitachi Building Systems. With thousands of elevators being inspected each year in Japan and a limited supply of workers with the skills for this task, Hitachi plans to start using AI agents to help existing workers, reports Nikkei Asia.
The pivot to AI-assisted elevator inspections is an interesting—and maybe a little disconcerting—example of AI providing guidance while humans do the legwork. Instead of a human peering over the worker’s shoulder, an AI agent will reside in a nearby server and scan the elevator from a camera (possibly attached to their helmet). According to Nikkei Asia, the AI can walk the worker through the steps, identify replacement parts, and let the worker know when they’ve made a mistake.
The potential downside to the AI inspection program is that it’s expected to cut the number of human jobs in half. Still, if Japan is having trouble filling spots, it’s unclear how much of a negative impact the AI inspection tools will have. According to Nikkei Asia, retirements are leading to a reduction in elevator workers.
Japan is also investing heavily in AI, as are businesses. And at the center of it all, unsurprisingly, is Nvidia, along with its Nvidia Cloud Partners, like SoftBank.
“Japan will see a 320x increase from 2020 in demand for AI computing power by 2030,” Kuniyoshi Suzuki, senior director of SoftBank’s cloud AI service division, said in a statement at Nvidia’s AI Day Tokyo. “To ensure transparency and safety as AI adoption expands, it is crucial to build a foundation of domestic technologies—high-performance, Japan-made large language models and large-scale domestic computing infrastructure capable of continuous LLM development.”
In late September, Hitachi and Nvidia announced a Hitachi AI factory, which is capable of handling the full lifecycle, from collecting data and training AI models to providing AI reasoning, also referred to as AI inference. The AI factory is distributed across several continents, including the US and Japan, rather than in a single physical location.
It’s worth mentioning that Nvidia’s dominant position in the AI marketplace is attracting growing competition. AMD, which was also quick to jump on the AI train, has been designing (and, with the help of another AI giant, chipmaker TSMC, producing) powerful GPUs for AI use. As we noted recently, OpenAI and AMD have a new deal that will inject billions into the deployment of AMD GPUs.
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