Sentient Factories: AI and the Future of Manufacturing

In March, we hosted Sentient Factories: AI and the Future of Manufacturing at the Royal Academy of Engineering, bringing together around 80 leaders from across the industrial base to explore how AI on the factory floor moves from promising demo to practical reality. Check out an overview video of the event here.

The room reflected just how broad that community is: government ministers, multinational CTOs, start-up founders, and engineers with decades of hands-on manufacturing experience. Guests travelled in from Glasgow to Worthing, Newcastle to Bristol — some to London for the first time in over 25 years. Between them, the manufacturers in the room build everything from cars and lawnmowers to whisky bottles, submarines, hazmat suits, and Formula 1 parts, employing hundreds of thousands of people and generating hundreds of billions in revenue.

Speakers included:

• Sir John Lazar, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Chair of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and General Partner at Enza Capital
• Kanishka Narayan MP, Minister for AI and Online Safety at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology
• Professor Tim Minshall, Head of the Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge
• Doug Brion, our Co-founder and CEO

Future of Manufacturing Panel

The evening also featured a panel on manufacturing AI in practice, with contributions from Sophia Martin (1st Kind), Alan Patterson (BeyondMath), Steven Grace (Cummins), and Jerry Gray (Bowers & Wilkins).

In his keynote, Doug made the case for why this moment matters. The UK was the birthplace of the first industrial revolution (home to Brunel, Watt, Arkwright, Stephenson, and Bessemer) and remains the world's third-largest AI ecosystem, trailing only the US and China. And yet, for the first time since that revolution began 250 years ago, the UK has fallen out of the world's top 10 manufacturing nations. His argument: Britain's best path back isn't copying China's scale (which now installs over half the world's industrial robots) or Silicon Valley's bet on fully autonomous humanoid robots – it's combining state-of-the-art AI with the tacit knowledge already on UK shop floors, and using the country's small size as an advantage. As he put it, a researcher in Oxford can be on a shop floor in Coventry within the hour – a kind of proximity most countries can't match.

Our Co-founder Sebastian Pattinson later shared his own reflections on the discussion, including a hard truth about industrial AI: the real test isn't a clean demo, it's whether a system holds up amid the complexity, constraints, and sheer variability of a live factory floor.

For our team, the event was one of the highlights of the year – not for the size of the room, but for what it represented: a manufacturing community willing to travel across the country because they believe this work matters.

Watch the talks:

• Doug Brion – Keynote on AI and the Future of Manufacturing
• Sir John Lazar – Welcome to the Royal Academy of Engineering
• Kanishka Narayan MP – Ministerial Address
• Professor Tim Minshall – Closing Reflections