Agent Manufacturing: Foundation-Model Agents as First-Class Industrial Entities
For manufacturing researchers and practitioners, this paper offers a conceptual framework to understand and guide the integration of foundation-model agents into production coordination, though it is a conceptual proposal without empirical validation.
The paper argues that foundation-model-based autonomous agents are now taking over the coordinative cognitive work in manufacturing (interpretation, allocation, diagnosis, negotiation, governance), defining a new paradigm called Agent Manufacturing. It provides a falsifiable definition distinguishing this from prior multi-agent systems and cognitive manufacturing concepts.
Manufacturing has passed through four widely recognized paradigms - mechanization, electrification, programmable automation, and Smart Manufacturing - each defined by the kind of work it shifted from humans to machines. In every case, one layer of industrial work remained fundamentally human: the coordinative cognition of production, comprising the interpretive, allocative, diagnostic, negotiative, and governance work exercised by engineers, planners, and operational managers. We argue that a fifth transition is now underway in which this layer, rather than the physical or routine-cognitive layers below it, is what foundation-model-based autonomous agents primarily redistribute. We name this paradigm Agent Manufacturing and define it operationally: a manufacturing system is an instance of Agent Manufacturing when its principal coordination mechanism is reasoning performed by foundation-model agents that can interpret open-ended goals, plan over long horizons, invoke tools and machines, and negotiate with other agents and humans. This is a narrower and more falsifiable definition than the existing literature on cognitive manufacturing or Industry 5.0 provides, and it distinguishes the paradigm sharply from classical multi-agent manufacturing systems, which were autonomous only within closed protocol spaces.