There are a few fields that could be interesting for hardware engineering: - Computer vision: the main tasks are object detection and classification which is widely used in quality control, process monitoring, ... - Data analysis: most factories these days have quite a lot of data, using data analysis you can understand where the inefficiencies lie or what could be improved (this is normally a pure numerical analysis) - Robotics and automation: heavily rely on AI for tasks like path planning, object recognition, and control - Reinforcement learning is used in fields like autonomous vehicles and game playing. Normally requires very accurate simulators, that's why it's not widely used.

Those are just some examples, my experience is mainly with autonomous vehicles, so I might be biased towards the technologies used there.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply! Reinforcement learning sounds pretty cool. I'm going to start by looking for a class I can take.