I work at IBM, particularly in the Industrial Sector that covers heavy industries including Manufacturing. Like many companies, we are pushing forward with the Digital Reinvention agenda using AI for manufacturing, we call it Cognitive Factory.
This is a business primitive that covers:
- Automation in handling tasks and actioning others based on rules/conditions
- IoT by integrating sensors into all different factory machinery or parts and collecting this data through capable cloud platforms (eg Watson IoT Platform) and extracting insights and intelligence out of that for predictive maintenance, asset life expectation, utilisation expectations, etc
- Cognitive Computing, where various factory operations get handled through smart systems that help employees get their work done faster and more efficiently. This includes things like Virtual Factory Advisors who can answer questions related to production progress, maintenance jobs, safety on site, etc, or Smart Search functionalities that allow engineers to surface data from the internal IP and knowledge base, or even Visual Recognition to detect anomalies on produced products or even machinery ware and tear.
I hope this answers your question. You can read more about this here