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A robotic arm gets to work at German manufacturer Rittal’s smart factory in Haiger, to the west of Hesse, Germany.

Rittal

Conversational artificial intelligence that can be used to communicate with equipment and generate machine parts. Digital versions of vehicles and planes that can be modified to fine-tune their physical counterparts. And autonomous robots that move as you walk by.

These are just a few of the technologies that will power the factories of the future, according to technologists and industry experts who spoke with CNBC.

In the future, factories will be much more connected, relying on a mix of technologies, from artificial intelligence, data platforms and edge devices to the cloud, robotics and sensors, Goetz Erhardt, Europe lead for Accenture’s digital engineering and manufacturing division, told CNBC.

“These technologies support fully automated, ‘dark’ plants, automated decision-making, enhanced equipment monitoring, and new production networks with recycling and upcycling capabilities,” Erhardt said via email.

Today’s factories — from those used in machinery and automobiles to food processing plants — have progressively become more advanced with regard to adopting technology. Robotic arms involved in the manufacturing process — adding and removing materials, welding and placing goods on pallets — are now a common sight.

More advanced A.I.

As much more advanced artificial intelligence technologies are added into the mix, the industrial manufacturing process could shake up further. Conversational systems such as OpenAI’s GPT could one day become integrated into robotics, enabling more sophisticated, emotionally intelligent machines.

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“Generative AI (AI that makes new content in response to user inputs) has enormous potential in manufacturing for equipment optimization, interaction and intelligence — from robotic processes through to machining,” Simon Floyd, director of manufacturing and transportation industries at Google Cloud, told CNBC.

Google is among the tech world giants looking to capitalize on large language models, which can generate more humanlike responses thanks to the huge amounts of data they are trained on. The company launched its own AI chatbot Bard earlier this year to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Consumer products aren’t the only focus of Google’s AI efforts. The company recently upgraded its cloud platform for manufacturers to more efficiently pull data from machines and detect anomalies in the production process.

Going forward, AI will be able to “converse using natural language with manufacturing equipment to understand the current state and the predicted future performance — therefore assisting people and allowing them to focus on high value tasks,” Google Cloud’s Floyd told CNBC.

Floyd said that Google is already working to achieve this with natural language processing capabilities in its AI tools. The company has also created a language model for robots called PaLM-E, which gathers sensory information from the physical environment, as well as text-based inputs.

Engineers will eventually be able to develop new machinery using generative AI tools, Floyd said.

“In the future, there is potential to generate content from and for many types of manufacturing equipment, ranging from specific repair instructions to software code that is tailored to a specific asset.”

‘Digital twins’

One development many industrialists are excited about is “digital twins” — 3D digital replicas of objects in the physical world that can be modified and updated in parallel with the items they aim to mimic.

One example of a company using digital twins to aid its physical manufacturing is Rolls Royce, whose engineers create precise virtual copies of its jet engines and then install sensors and satellite networks on-board to feed back data to the digital copy in real time.

“For every modern Rolls Royce jet engine up on a plane in the sky, there’s one in the cyber sphere that needs to be maintained, working out how much stress is going through the plane,” said John Hill, CEO of Silico AI, a startup that focuses on digital twins for business processes. “That will depend on how the engine is faring in the atmospheric conditions and pressures in the air.”

Another example is Renault, which created a digital twin for a new “software-defined” car with artificial intelligence capabilities to enhance services.

The Metaverse is grappling with investment scale back

Digital twins form part of the so-called “metaverse,” which embodies the idea that people will spend more of their work and leisure time in huge 3D digital spaces. Some companies are also looking to incorporate the physical world in some iterations of the metaverse. 

Many manufacturers see potential in the “industrial metaverse,” a version of the metaverse tailored to the manufacturing, construction and engineering industries. Accenture’s Erhardt told CNBC that he is mainly seeing use cases in creative collaboration and product development, maintenance and remote repairs, designing and optimizing production operations, and workforce training

“The metaverse could become a game changer for industrial companies once they couple its collaborative, immersive, visual and intuitive dimensions with digital twins fed by integrated data pools across departments, systems, operations technology and IT,” Erhardt said. “This could create a virtual, fully immersive and intuitive simulation of the entire enterprise.”

Safety first

Companies are looking for ways to cut down on more menial tasks in factories with digital technology, amid a wave of labor shortages.

“Previously, automation has not been an option for manufacturing products due to minimal financial resources and investment,” Olivier Ribet, Executive Vice President, EMEAR at Dassault Systèmes, told CNBC.

“However, this is changing rapidly due to technological changes that have decreased costs and democratized automation through low/no code robotics allowing more manufacturing companies to leverage the advantages of automation in terms of precision, efficiency, and productivity.”

There are downsides to consider — not least of which job security — as the rise of AI and digital automation in factories has led to worries about the labor market. Generative AI, a relatively recent development, could erase 300 million jobs, Goldman Sachs estimates.

Still, history shows that technological progress doesn’t just make jobs redundant, it also creates new roles— which typically outpaces the number of jobs displaced. Manufacturers are still scrambling for staff, with 41% of manufacturing businesses citing talent pool as a “very significant” barrier preventing full potential, according to a Bain and Company survey.

The hope is that connecting machines to the internet and integrating sensors and predictive AI algorithms will allow them to more safely navigate their surroundings and work collaboratively with humans, rather than replace them, according to Maya Pindeus, CEO of AI startup Humanising Autonomy.

“Think of the factory, you have robot arms, you have different vehicles to move goods around, you have operators, you have safety cameras,” Pindeus told CNBC. 

“What I would look at in the factory of the future is you have high levels of safe automation that can operate around people … I’ve been to factories where you have the big robot arm caged up and it’s really far away from people. It looks very inefficient to me.”

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Elon Musk’s X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

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Elon Musk's X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.

About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.

Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.

The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.

Read more CNBC politics coverage

X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.

Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.

The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.

The site experienced another outage in March, which Musk attributed at the time to a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post at the time.

This is breaking news. Check back for updates

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.

Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.

Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.

Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.

“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”

Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.

Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.

“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.

‘AI’s moment to shine’

Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nike already raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.

Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.

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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.

Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”

Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.

‘Not a silver bullet’

While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.

“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”

AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.

“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty.  But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.

The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.

“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.

“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”

WATCH: Former OpenAI exec says tariffs ‘present AI’s moment to shine’

Former OpenAI exec says tariffs 'present AI's moment to shine'

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Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

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Amazon's Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.

On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.

“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”

Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.

A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.

The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”

If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.

Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.

The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”

Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”

While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.

Tesla is promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

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Tesla's decade-long journey to robotaxis

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