Software does the task it was bought for and leaves the rest of the plant unchanged. An AI agent treated as an employee gets a role, works across departments with the full context of the operation, and gets better at the job with every shift it runs.
Many plants have AI projects. Some are in development. Others are piloted. Some have even reached production. Far fewer manufacturers have implemented AI that transforms how the plant is managed. Adding another one-off project won’t change that.
A Harvard Business Review study published this year by Jianjun Zhang and Bin Li explains why. The researchers followed two similar companies that had the same technology in the same market. One company used AI as a tool and left its structure alone. The other assigned AI a role and let it change how teams worked together and how managers ran their departments. The second company pulled ahead decisively.
Part of the issue is the historic pattern of manufacturer tech adoption. For decades, the industry has bought technology to speed up one process at a time. When the team chose well, each purchase did its narrow job. But those purchases almost never changed how the plant operated. Read the full blog post here >>
