Agentic AI in Manufacturing: Building a Repeatable, Hybrid Agent Architecture

Christoph Berlin, vice president of engineering at Cloud AI at Microsoft, explains how agentic AI can be deployed across factories and plants at scale. He addresses the practical constraints of running agents across 300 sites with latency, real-time, and resiliency requirements, and outlines a blueprint for a repeatable and composable agent architecture.

■ Deployment Reality and Constraints
- Why not everything can be moved to the cloud and why running 300 separate on-premise instances is impractical
- The case for a hybrid model with one agent framework that can run anywhere
■ Recommended Blueprint
- Common data contracts to avoid building everything bespoke
- Guardrails for secure policy handling across environments
- Agent runtime options: cloud, edge, and fully disconnected scenarios
- Managing one agent implementation across many sites through a single interface
■ Key Learnings
- How agentic AI accelerates business processes without replacing them
- How the right architecture makes agentic AI repeatable rather than bespoke

This talk is aimed at engineering leaders, manufacturing IT professionals, and AI practitioners designing agent deployments at scale. It helps viewers understand the architectural principles and trade-offs involved in scaling agentic AI across industrial sites. Further reading is available at microsoft.com/ai/manufacturing.