A mechanic at a Ford dealership who has never pulled the engine from a Super Duty pickup can now follow instructions from artificial intelligence (AI) through the job. Removing the engine alone takes about two days, Ford CEO Jim Farley said at a media roundtable...
Procter & Gamble is expanding an artificial intelligence (AI) quality inspection system across its manufacturing operations worldwide, turning a tool that proved itself on individual lines into standard equipment for the whole company. The system, built with Siemens, inspects every product in real time at...
U.S. business activity grew in September at the fastest rate for over five years, according to the S&P Global US Flash PMI released Wednesday (Sept. 23). The flash S&P Global US PMI Composite Output Index rose from 56.0 in August to 58.4 in September, marking the fourth...
The physical AI boom is easy to picture as a new factory filled with humanoid robots and autonomous machines. The bigger opportunity may be much less futuristic. It’s making factories built decades ago smarter without replacing the equipment already inside them. That market is taking...
September 11, 2026
Ask a veteran factory technician how to fix a machine that’s acting up, and the answer might sound less like an engineering manual and more like folklore: if it smells like this, hit it three times on the left side and it comes back to life. That kind of knowledge never gets written down. It […]
May 15, 2026
The modern economy increasingly runs on two separate operating systems. One is digital, asset-light and geographically fluid. The other is physical, capital-intensive and exposed to every fracture line in the...
February 11, 2026
Manufacturers racing to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) are often experiencing an uncomfortable reality: productivity declines before gains materialize. A study by MIT Sloan describes what it calls a “productivity paradox”...
December 29, 2025
Take a look at the agenda for the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show if you want to see where agentic AI is headed. Said agenda is loaded up this year with...
September 23, 2026
U.S. business activity grew in September at the fastest rate for over five years, according to the S&P Global US Flash PMI released Wednesday (Sept. 23). The flash S&P Global US PMI Composite Output Index rose from 56.0 in August to 58.4 in September, marking the fourth consecutive month of accelerating growth as well as the fastest […]
March 19, 2026
Jeff Bezos is meeting with some of the world’s largest asset managers to raise $100 billion for a new fund that would buy manufacturing companies and transform them with the...
March 04, 2026
OpenAI’s former chief research officer is reportedly raising $70 million for a manufacturing-focused artificial intelligence (AI) startup. Arda, co-founded by Bob McGrew, is raising money at a valuation of $700...
March 03, 2026
The manufacturing sector saw more economic activity in February, marking the second consecutive month of growth and only the third month of growth in the past 40 months, the Institute...
