Agent Manufacturing: Foundation-Model Agents as First-Class Industrial Entities
Manufacturing has passed through four widely recognized paradigms - mechanization, electrification, programmable automation, and Smart Manufacturing - each defined by the kind of work it shifted from humans to machines. In every case, one layer of industrial work remained fundamentally human: the coordinative cognition of production, comprising the interpretive, allocative, diagnostic, negotiative, and governance work exercised by engineers, planners, and operational managers. We argue that a fifth transition is now underway in which this layer, rather than the physical or routine-cognitive layers below it, is what foundation-model-based autonomous agents primarily redistribute. We name t...
| Authors | Yilei Zhang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 24 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 May 2026 |
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