Inside the agentic factory: How manufacturers are ushering in a new age of autonomy

As we prepare to gather at McCormick Place for IMTS 2026, the manufacturing industry stands at a pivotal crossroads. For decades, we have focused on traditional industrial automation — the hardcoded, repetitive execution of tasks.

Walk onto almost any factory floor today, and the evidence of yesterday’s operations is clear: clipboards of handwritten logs, flashing warning lights on isolated PLCs, and technicians spending hours flipping through thick binders of paper manuals to troubleshoot a single machine failure. This friction does not just slow down production. It traps talented workers in a cycle of reactive problem-solving, constantly chasing fragmented data across systems that cannot speak to each other.

It doesn’t have to be this way anymore. Instead of isolated, siloed operations, we need the agentic factory.

This shift moves us beyond static automation toward a future where agentic AI acts as the digital orchestrator — synthesizing data from core operational technology, engineering, and IT systems to plan and execute multi-step workflows, as many industry leaders already are. Meanwhile, physical AI embeds this intelligence directly into the physical world, bringing real-world reasoning to autonomous robots and edge devices on the plant floor. Together, they turn isolated machines into a cohesive, reasoning ecosystem.

At Google Cloud, we’re working with global manufacturers to lead this charge. Our AI stack provides the industry with a robust, comprehensive, and purpose-built AI platform, infrastructure, and partners to improve operations across the organization. By aligning our technologies directly with our customers' operational goals, we help scale agentic intelligence from the shop floor to the top floor to help drive bottom-line business results.

Real-world agentic operations in action today

The transition to the agentic factory is not a distant goal. It’s actively unfolding across shop floors globally. By integrating Gemini Enterprise across core systems, these industry pioneers are driving step-change improvements in operational resilience, workforce capability, and industrial security:

• AI-Powered Manufacturing at GE Appliances: GE Appliances is scaling Gemini Enterprise across its organization, where employees have created more than 800 customized AI agents for a range of business needs. In manufacturing, Gemini Enterprise is helping enhance the company’s Brilliant Factory platform with capabilities that help teams understand shift performance, trace part genealogy, and identify production issues faster. Beyond the plant floor, a specialized Supplier Collaboration Agent automates routine communications with more than 600 service-parts suppliers and has helped reduce backorders by 25%.
• Advancing industrial autonomy with Honeywell Technologies: Honeywell Technologies is combining its deep industrial domain expertise, its FORGE platform, and Gemini Enterprise to bring AI into the physical world and accelerate the path toward autonomous operations. Together, the companies are developing specialized industrial AI agents that automate complex engineering tasks, improve product design and accelerate development cycles. Honeywell Technologies is also bringing Gemini’s multimodal intelligence to edge devices used in plants and warehouses, enabling visual intelligence and voice-guided workflows even without internet connectivity. Simultaneously, by integrating Google Threat Intelligence into Honeywell Technologies' purpose-built OT cybersecurity capabilities, the companies are helping customers better protect critical industrial operations from evolving cyber threats.
• Supply Chain Modernization at Briggs & Stratton: Briggs & Stratton, a longtime Google Workspace customer, is expanding its partnership to integrate Gemini Enterprise across its global supply chain. The rollout builds on the success of Briggs & Stratton Assist, their award-winning customer service agent developed using Gemini Enterprise. By securely analyzing operations and SAP data with BigQuery and Gemini, supply chain teams resolve volume change controls, exception message handling, and safety stock management in seconds. To upskill its workforce with hands-on AI experience, the company has empowered employees to build and deploy more than 25 low-code agents leveraging Gemini Enterprise.

Bridging the physical world with digital reality

One key component of scaling agentic transformation across manufacturing is an open, secure partner ecosystem that integrates physical robotics with digital intelligence. Here's a look at what some of the leaders in physical AI are building with Google Cloud:

• Accelerating enterprise transformation with Accenture: Through our strategic alliance, Accenture ​pairs its deep digital engineering and change-management expertise with Google Cloud’s edge infrastructure and AI platforms. Together, we deliver pre-integrated blueprints that bridge operational technology to the cloud — enabling global manufacturers to rapidly scale high-impact AI across multi-site plant networks for asset performance optimization and closed-loop quality control.
• Next-generation autonomy with FANUC: Operating on Gemini Enterprise, FANUC built a revolutionary AI agent system that translates simple, natural-language commands into complex mechanical actions, completely eliminating the need for manual programming. This system enables Google’s first multi-robot orchestration, allowing for collaborative and non-collaborative robots to autonomously perceive their environment and safely coordinate physical tasks. side-by-side in a single cell.
• Scaling physical AI with Apptronik: Under a strategic research partnership, Apptronik is collaborating with Google DeepMind to advance Gemini Robotics, Google DeepMind’s foundation models for robotics, and build the next generation of humanoid intelligence. Using Google Cloud to deploy and scale these embodied reasoning models with real-world operational data, the Apollo robot can perform precise, human-like kitting and pick-and-place manipulation in factory workcells safely alongside humans.
• Scaling shop floor wisdom with Augury: To capture valuable factory-floor knowledge that might otherwise be lost to attrition and labor turnover, Augury’s Industrial AI Workforce platform added the OKF Industrial Profile — an open standard built on Google Cloud's Open Knowledge Format (OKF). Available on GitHub, this free framework lets manufacturers easily turn the undocumented experience of veteran workers and basic machine trust rules into clear, digital guidelines that agents can trust. Instead of relying only on raw, confusing sensor data, plant-floor AI agents now have the practical, human-approved context they need to make safer, smarter decisions.

Transforming manufacturing operations at scale

Global manufacturers cannot rely on legacy systems of the past to power the agentic factory of the future. Building the agentic factory requires moving beyond simply retrofitting outdated architectures; it demands a purpose-built, next-generation foundation.

We saw ample evidence of the need for a complete AI overhaul in Google Cloud’s 2026 ROI of AI report. Among the manufacturing executives we surveyed with NRG Research, 56% identify cloud and infrastructure modernization as the primary enabler for AI adoption, while 51% point to the redesign of workflows to embed AI into core processes, and 49% highlight the importance of workforce training and change management.

To make this architecture a reality, Google Cloud connects every layer of the industrial lifecycle — turning raw plant floor data into autonomous, human-supervised action through three core capabilities. Here’s a look at some of the ways our AI, compute, storage, and analytics tools are making the agentic factory and Industry 5.0 possible:

• Unifying industrial data: Before AI can reason, it must be grounded in physical reality. Purpose-built solutions like the Manufacturing Data Engine (MDE) and our new solution releasing later this year, the Operational Data Engine (ODE), ingest and contextualize live machine telemetry, PLCs, and SCADA streams into BigQuery, Google’s secure, enterprise-grade analytics platform. By harmonizing operational technology with enterprise ERP records, plant teams eliminate data silos and give AI agents the accurate, real-time foundation needed for predictive maintenance and quality control.
• Empowering the workforce with multimodal agents: With a unified data layer in place, Gemini Enterprise acts as the cognitive engine for operations. Gemini’s native multimodality allows it to interpret complex engineering schematics, maintenance manuals, thermal imagery, and machine audio like a veteran technician. This equips frontline workers with real-time virtual assistants inside their daily workflows, while allowing teams to build specialized agents that automate multi-step decisions across areas like supplier collaboration, energy management, and throughput optimization.
• Bridging digital intelligence to physical execution: The final step is translating digital intelligence into the physical world. Powered by Gemini Robotics foundation models and accelerated by the massive compute power of Google Cloud TPUs, digital decisions are converted into spatial awareness and precise robotic movements for workcell assembly and autonomous inspections. This entire ecosystem is protected end-to-end by Google Cloud’s OT Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence, protecting critical machinery and proprietary IP without interrupting live production lines.

The agentic factory isn’t just about deploying smarter machines, it’s about pairing advanced digital orchestration with human ingenuity. When we put the tools of the future directly into the hands of our workforce, we unlock a smarter way of operating across the entire industrial lifecycle — from accelerating product design and optimizing shop-floor production to elevating the long-term customer ownership experience.

Join us for the full Google experience at IMTS 2026

To experience the agentic factory in action, connect with Google Cloud at IMTS 2026 from September 14–19 at McCormick Place in Chicago.

• Global Manufacturing Keynote: Join me, FANUC America CEO Mike Cicco, and Honeywell Technologies VP and CTO of Forge and AI Mehul Patel, on Monday, September 14 at 11:30 AM CT (IMTS Keynote Stage) for a discussion on The Agentic Factory: Where Human Ingenuity Meets Industrial AI.
• Physical AI in Action with Google Cloud: Visit the Google Cloud Booth (#236709) to see Apptronik's Apollo robot in action, alongside an end-to-end demo of autonomous robotics trained in NVIDIA Issac Sim using Google Cloud simulation environments.
• Embodied AI Inspections with Boston Dynamics: Come visit the Boston Dynamics Booth (#236620) to see live demonstrations of Spot conducting autonomous plant-floor inspections, leveraging Google Cloud's AI Hypercomputer and Gemini robotics models to translate real-world visual telemetry into safe, self-correcting navigation and correcting physical tasks on the shop floor.