Agent crew continuously monitors and optimizes production
Sight Machine Inc., the industry-leading AI platform, brings autonomous agent operations to manufacturing, with a crew of autonomous AI agents working around the clock to maximize production performance. These capabilities, which Sight Machine will be demonstrating at the Hannover Messe trade show this week, will dramatically accelerate manufacturers’ timelines for achieving results using AI.
General purpose AI tools are unable to understand raw industrial data. Sight Machine’s crew of AI agents solve production problems and improve productivity by working with Sight Machine’s Semantic Layer, a continuously updated digital representation of the manufacturing process generated by Sight Machine’s industrial AI platform.
Individual agents focus on improving KPIs such as throughput, quality, and cost, while working together as a team to achieve overall optimization of manufacturing and business outcomes. Agents use Sight Machine’s extensive set of manufacturing analytics tools and work with development agents to create custom analytics applications within guardrails as needed.
Sight Machine is also building the ability of agents to deploy industrial data platforms and compose the semantic layer, accelerating implementation and giving operational teams control. Agents allow operations teams to extend the semantic layer to include new machines, lines, and product SKUs. This reduces dependence on software developers and specialist systems integrators and puts more power and flexibility in the hands of users.
“By fusing the power of rapidly advancing AI technology with a unique semantic layer generated by Sight Machine’s industrial AI platform, Sight Machine has bridged the gap between general-purpose AI technology and the highly challenging nature of production data,” said Jon Sobel, CEO and co-founder of Sight Machine. “Sight Machine is the lynchpin that enables AI to function effectively in the physical world of manufacturing.”
Sight Machine is previewing these features at Hannover Messe as part of ongoing platform development and plans to expand availability in the second half of 2026.
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Progress towards autonomous operation
The AI agent staff initially operates in analysis and recommendation mode, simulating possibilities, determining optimal settings, and making recommendations to the operations team. As agent crews demonstrate their capabilities and reliability, manufacturers can choose to extend their authority to directly control certain settings and procedures, allowing them to gradually move toward autonomous operations at a pace they control.
Agent staff uses Sight Machine’s manufacturing analysis tools, including statistical analysis, ML techniques (such as random forests), AI-enhanced center lines and golden runs, cookbooks, and root cause analysis. Within a manufacturer-managed permissioned framework, agency staff can code and tailor new tools for analysis, optimization, and presentation.
Agents communicate with other agents and tools using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). MCP is an open standard that enables secure, structured interoperability between AI agents and the tools they use. In addition to the security layers within Sight Machine’s platform, the software runs within the enterprise security and data governance provided by Microsoft Azure.
“Operations teams assign goals to agents, and each agent continually works to achieve that goal, whether it’s increasing availability, minimizing defects, or maximizing throughput,” said Andrew Home, vice president of products at Sight Machine. “The agent is always on and examines the current operating state, all process parameters, looks for anomalies or changes in state, and provides recommendations to the operator on how to improve.”
Working under the direction of a human operator and subject to operator reviews for quality and suitability, a crew of agents collaborates to balance trade-offs between outcomes (e.g., maximizing throughput and quality). We can provide recommendations for optimizing the type of product you make or switching the raw materials you use, such as changing machine settings, temperatures, process times, etc.
Collaborate with operations teams through productivity tools
Users can engage with and share insights, recommendations, and analysis from Sight Machine’s industrial AI platform through ubiquitous productivity tools like Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Teams, and enterprise data platforms like Microsoft Fabric and Databricks, without requiring manufacturing software expertise.
