The Next Just-In-Time? How Agentic AI Is Rewiring The Factory

InnovationAIThe Next Just-In-Time? How Agentic AI Is Rewiring The FactoryByMichael Ashley,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The author of many tech books, Michael Ashley covers AI and Big Data.Follow AuthorMay 28, 2026, 08:30am EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Is Agentic AI the key to a new of working, enabling tomorrow's plants to do more with less?Deposit PhotosFactory work has never been exactly glamorous. But it can be quite lucrative, so long as you correctly balance your time and efforts like a gymnast perched on a narrow beam. To appreciate the dangers of that balancing act, imagine this frustrating scenario. Every Monday, as head of an industrial plant, you watch with dismay as your top people disappear into a pile of Requests for Quotes (RFQs), knowing full well that all their hard work may result in nothing.“The problem is simple,” explains Daryl Edwards in our interview. “Factories waste time figuring out a price for projects they might not even win.”Edwards understands this dilemma. Before founding Toronto-based Agent Impact, a manufacturing AI firm, he was a plant manager as well as VP of operations, helping to scale Peru’s largest shoe exporter.Though the formidable challenge Edwards names is real, so is the possible solution now emerging: Agentic AI. To appreciate the fix, we must first go back in time and across the world. Following World War II, Japan was committed to rebuilding its economy after so much devastation.This was no easy feat. The defeated nation was short on resources and pinched for space to process inventory. It couldn’t afford to pursue America’s more wasteful production model. The States’ industrial approach often ran on buffer stock and big inventories. Flush with a booming economy, American warehouses could afford to sit full against unpredictable orders and stalled wait times for parts.Japa...