What is Microsoft for Manufacturing?

Industrial AI transformation is accelerating, with nearly every software vendor offering AI solutions for the industrial sector. Manufacturers are building or piloting GenAI solutions, especially for process optimization, sustainability, and product design. While the goal is to boost productivity and reduce costs, most manufacturers have yet to realize significant cost reductions, and proving ROI remains a challenge. As a result, technology leaders are increasingly turning to agentic AI solutions that autonomously complete specific tasks, providing clearer productivity and cost benefits.

Microsoft supports this transition by investing in agentic AI capabilities—from infrastructure to platforms for creating, orchestrating, and evolving agents—and collaborating with leading software development companies to advance agentic AI strategies. The Microsoft strategy for manufacturing focuses on three key areas:

• Leading with agentic AI: Demonstrating how Microsoft and its partners address key manufacturing use cases with AI agents, positioning Microsoft platforms as the preferred environment for building and interacting with these agents.
• Building the digital thread for AI agents: Ensuring agents and AI are trained on high-quality data by helping customers build a digital thread in Microsoft Fabric, ingesting and transforming data from multiple sources to make it AI-ready.
• Providing secure infrastructure for manufacturing: Delivering edge-to-cloud connectivity with Azure’s Adaptive Cloud approach, supporting system migrations, and offering scalable computing for agentic AI.

Microsoft for Manufacturing brings together Microsoft and partner solutions to accelerate digital transformation, unlock engineering and design innovation, build resilient supply chains, enable intelligent factories, and modernize customer experiences. By integrating siloed systems across IT, OT, and ET, Microsoft for Manufacturing democratizes data insights and fosters collaboration across the value chain. This approach is guided by four priorities:

• Enabling data interoperability with existing systems and applications
• Supporting copilot and agent development with a responsible AI approach
• Focusing on solution scalability and time-to-value
• Securing your data, IP, and manufacturing assets

With an AI-powered digital thread framework and a unified data foundation, Microsoft for Manufacturing empowers manufacturers to:

• Use data in a scalable, interoperable way to deliver measurable value and real ROI
• Deploy agents to help frontline workers uncover insights, minimize downtime, automate analyses, improve decision making, and manage industrial processes
• Leverage copilots to help engineers automate requirements handling, enhance quality control, and boost productivity
• Optimize production scheduling, improve supply chain visibility, and enable predictive maintenance with AI.

Digital engineering

Accelerate R&D and design with data representations of your physical products, assets, and factories. Simulate different scenarios for product design optimization, process improvement or factory set-up decisions. Run PLM workloads on the cloud to gain agility, efficiency, and scalability. Leverage PLM data to enable intelligent digital threads and custom AI agents. Evolve connected and software defined products based on a modern edge-to-cloud architecture. Launch new business models like product-as-a-service, and digital ecosystems.

For more insights on Digital engineering and details about Microsoft and partner solutions, see Digital engineering.

Resilient supply chains

Build a resilient and sustainable manufacturing supply chain with data-driven planning tools that connect demand, supply, production, inventory and transportation data with sales, marketing, operations, and finance. Modernize warehouse operations with innovative, autonomous solutions. Leverage supply chain data to optimize inventory allocation and achieve perfect fulfillment. Use your supply chain, customer, and market data to create predictive and prescriptive supply chain planning models. Unlock always-on supply chain intelligence to make fast decisions and avoid disruptions.

For more insights on Resilient supply chains and details about Microsoft and partner solutions, see Resilient supply chains.

Intelligent factories

Enable the intelligent factory of the future by using production data from sensors, machines, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), factory, and enterprise systems to gain visibility into operations and identify opportunities for optimization with AI. Get your factory edge ready for AI with a scalable and secure framework for factory application modernization and deployment. Utilize digital tools to enhance factory workers’ performance via seamless communication and collaboration, data capture, and immersive training for onboarding and upskilling.

For more insights on Intelligent factories and details about Microsoft and partner solutions, see Intelligent factories.

Connected customer experiences

Modernize customer experiences by helping your marketers, sellers, and service agents better understand customer needs and create delightful digital experiences. Provide service agents with the AI tools to streamline workorder management and solve complex service use cases with AI assistance or step-by-step interactive instructions. Empower sellers in a B2B (manufacturer to distributor) selling motion to close deals faster and improve customer care with AI tools. Deliver personalized marketing to new and existing customers at scale with AI solutions deployed on top of a data foundation that unifies customer, sales, and market data. 

For more insights on Connected customer experiences and details about Microsoft and partner solutions, see Connected customer experience.

Next steps

• How to get started with Microsoft for Manufacturing?