We already have a sort of AI that can be used for real world applications - it's called the Internet. Using Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and dozens of other sites, it's relatively easy to create a robot that can do quite a lot of things - the problem is that creating the actual physical body of the robot is expensive - humans are cheaper and still do everything better.

We don't even need AI, we need robots for specific tasks that would also be programmed to work around any potential issues (most of which can be identified and programmed if the field of application is narrow enough) - making them create workarounds/solutions for new problems would be awesome and all, but it's not necessary, IMO.