There is a lot of noise in this area, so here is my position. An AI agent is useful in a factory when it reads real operational data and saves a person from reading it. It is dangerous when it produces confident numbers that nobody can trace back to a source.

Everything I build sits firmly on the first side of that line. The agents are grounded in your actual data, and where a number appears, it came from a record you can go and look at.

What these agents actually do

The most valuable one is unglamorous: it reads production and downtime data, compares it against the plan, flags what is out of line, and writes a short plain-language summary of the top issues with likely causes. It lands before the shift meeting instead of a shift too late, and it means the meeting starts from the problems rather than from someone assembling the list.

Beyond that: anomaly detection and alerting on operational data, so a drift gets noticed while it is still cheap to fix. Document and data extraction, pulling structured data out of forms, certificates, and reports that arrive as files rather than as data. Screening and ranking work where a human makes the final call but should not be reading a hundred items to find the ten that matter.

How I keep them honest

The agent works from your data, not from what a language model believes about manufacturing. It cites what it used. When the data does not support a conclusion, saying so is the correct output, and the agents are built to do that rather than to fill the gap.

I have opinions about where this technology is not ready, and I would rather tell you that at the start of a conversation than at the end of an invoice.

Being straight about how I build

I build these tools with AI assistance. I am an industrial engineer, not a career software engineer, and I am specific about that because it is the honest description of how this work gets done now. What I bring is knowing what a factory actually needs and being able to ship a working tool against it. More than twelve standalone tools built this way are running in production.