Solar stills are a promising technology widely used to produce freshwater from saltwater, especially in remote and arid regions. Despite their simplicity and lower capital and operating costs, their use is limited by inherently low productivity. The present study presents a novel and sustainable technique to enhance the performance of a hemispherical solar still (HSS) by adopting two value-added innovations. First, the waste copper shavings, a lowcost industrial waste material, were used as an efficient thermal-conductivity enhancer for paraffin wax phase change material (PCM), rather than expensive nanoparticles, which are difficult to prepare and not readily available. Second, recycled aluminum beverage cans were used as a cost-efficient thermal storage medium and container for PCM. Additionally, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) regression model based on artificial intelligence was developed to predict the system's performance under different operating conditions accurately and to indicate the complex relationships among different operating conditions. The study results indicated that using copper shaving with PCM achieved the highest increase in water productivity, energy efficiency, and exergy efficiency of 108.3%, 112.5%, and 303.7%, respectively. The predictive model accurately predicted the performance of the solar still, with R2 = 0.977, MAE = 34.07 mL/m2, and RMSE = 45.36 mL/m. Therefore, a successful integration of innovative, cost-effective modification with advanced AI modeling offers a comprehensive, practical approach to optimizing solar desalination systems.