Time delays in industrial, biological, and chemical processes can significantly impair system performance, which conventional PID controllers may not adequately mitigate. This paper is an earnest effort to design and implement a Fractional-Order Proportional–Integral–Derivative (FOPID) controller using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for first-order time-delay system. The proposed ACO-based FOPID controller optimizes controller parameters by minimizing the Integral Time Absolute Error (ITAE). MATLAB simulation results demonstrate that the ACO-FOPID controller outperforms Integer-Order PID (IOPID), Fractional Ms Constrained Integral Gain Optimization Method (FMIGO), and Fractional-Order Proportional–Integral (FOPI) controllers in terms of overshoot, rise time, settling time, and disturbance rejection. The ACO-tuned FOPID controller achieves the lowest ITAE value, exhibiting enhanced performance in time-domain parameters and robustness against gain variations.