July 15, 2025
Hitachi Digital Services and DS Smith came together at the Hitachi HQ in London to explore how AI – particularly Generative and Agentic AI – are reshaping the future of manufacturing. The event brought to light the need to evolve from Industry 4.0, which has often struggled to scale beyond pilot phases, to a more human-centric and intelligent Industry 5.0. Key barriers such as fragmented IT/OT systems, skills shortages, and cybersecurity concerns continue to hinder progress. Hitachi proposes a new blueprint built on five pillars: human-AI collaboration, industrial edge, sustainability AI, hyper-personalisation, and the industrial metaverse.
A central focus was Agentic AI—autonomous, goal-driven systems that act and adapt with minimal human oversight. Real-world use cases are already live across Hitachi operations: robotic process control, dynamic production scheduling, predictive maintenance bots, and intelligent energy optimisation. These systems don’t just detect and predict—they plan, execute, and learn in real time.
Generative AI is also proving transformative across the manufacturing value chain. It’s accelerating everything from product design and market research to HR support, contract analysis, and supply chain forecasting. At DS Smith, initiatives like GenAI-powered document processing have already yielded tangible savings by replacing legacy OCR systems. Meanwhile, Connected Factory 2030 is aligning data from factory floors to enterprise level, enabling predictive maintenance, energy optimisation, and next-gen supply chain visibility.
The event also considered the importance of secure, scalable infrastructure. Partnering with AWS, Hitachi is leveraging platforms like Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker to safely deploy customised GenAI applications at industrial scale.
Looking ahead, the journey continues from basic prompt engineering to fully autonomous, self-healing systems. Hitachi’s evolving ecosystem of AI agents spans everything from contract management and logistics to security and engineering—each working together to optimise performance and drive sustainable growth.
Conclusion
The Hitachi DS Manufacturing Event highlighted a clear shift in the manufacturing landscape, driven by the need to overcome past challenges of Industry 4.0 and embrace the integrated, autonomous, and human-centric approach of Industry 5.0. Generative AI and Agentic AI are presented as core technologies enabling this transformation, offering tangible benefits from optimized processes and cost savings to enhanced safety and new service creation. The success story of DS Smith provides a practical blueprint for how large manufacturing organizations can embark on this digital journey, emphasizing the importance of strategic alignment, incremental adoption, and ecosystem collaboration.
Key takeaways? Start small but think big. Always tie innovation to real business value. And build a collaborative ecosystem that includes partners, platforms, and people.
Here’s a short AI-generated podcast for you to listen to: