Praveen Rao, Head of Manufacturing for Google Cloud, spoke at this week’s Connected Worker Conference about a survey the company conducted by National Research Corp. of manufacturing executives regarding their investments in AI. Agents were of specific interest.
We’ll skip the suspense. 78% of the executives surveyed believe they are seeing a return on their investment.
I asked Rao of agents were real or still in the vaporware phase. He assured me that there are many agentic AI use cases. A refresher—agents work with LLMs to “see, hear, think—they can design and simulate.”
There are supply chain use cases, but Rao assured me there are many other use cases. He pointed to engineering and product design workflow improvements when he pointed to 75% of surveyed executives see agents used to improve productivity. Other key areas of interest include improving customer experience (support, etc. 64%), business growth (60%), marketing (creating brochures and the like, 58%), and security (53%).
I’m interested in how these technologies can work with unstructured data. Eventually that will be a massive win.
Back to the survey from the press release:
According to the survey of more than 500 manufacturing execs, 56% reported their organizations are actively using AI agents, with 37% reporting they have launched ten or more. These agents range from gen AI-powered chatbots and single-task agents for specific functions like scheduling production jobs — all the way to sophisticated, multi-agent systems that can take actions on behalf of users, under their supervision.
Additional findings include:
AI agents are being used for core business processes such including:
54% use them for quality control
48% use them for production planning
47% use them for supply chain and logistics
Over half of manufacturing executives (55%) stated their organizations plan to allocate 50% or more of their future AI budget to AI agents,
The primary consideration for executives when evaluating LLM providers is data privacy and security (37%), followed by system integration and scalability and performance.
Google Cloud marketing includes this interesting caveat: In other words, AI success hinges on deep cross-functional collaboration, but it’s top-level support that will truly drive results, aligning AI adoption with business goals and guiding crucial decisions about its fundamental use within organizations.
Yes, technology enables and provides tools, but in the end it’s people and systems and organization that creates a win.
