Accenture, Avanade and Microsoft are co-developing an AI-powered factory intelligence system designed to help manufacturers manage production issues through collaboration between human workers and automated agents.
The “agentic factory” is already in use by manufacturers Kruger, a North American tissue and paper products company, and Nissha Metallizing Solutions, a global manufacturer of metallized paper for packaging, and is planned to be released for general availability later in the year.
The system assists factory operators with status checks, diagnostics and guided troubleshooting when production lines or machines underperform.
It will use operational context, historical machine data, and production records to suggest probable causes and recommended actions. The agentic system can also help prepare maintenance tickets or spare parts orders when further support is needed.
Avanade is an IT consulting and services firm focused on Microsoft’s technology.
The product is built on Accenture and Avanade’s existing Factory Agents and Analytics offering, and runs on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Copilot, and will be available via subscription.
It will bring together structured data from manufacturing execution systems, condition monitoring, control and alerting systems, machine and sensor telemetry, and data from unstructured sources such as failure mode and effects analysis documentation.
It will use Fabric as the data foundation and Foundry to reason across these sources, with AI agents there to deliver guidance at the point of work through conversational interfaces.
“Unplanned downtime impacts safety, productivity and performance across our operation,” said Eric Ashby, chief operations officer at Kruger.
He claimed a 10-15% reduction in mean-time-to-repair since the introduction of the system.
“With this agentic factory, we can help our teams respond faster to issues, capture operational knowledge and continuously improve how our factories run.”
Edoardo Palmo, global operations manager at Nissha Metallizing Solutions, said that, with the agentic factory solution, “we can improve root cause exploration in order to significantly reduce scrap and unplanned downtime for a competitive edge in an increasingly dynamic market.”