Agentic Operations: The Next Phase of Industry 4.0 Is Not on the Shop Floor

Why Attend

Manufacturers have spent a decade making the plant floor smarter, while the back office rarely received the same level of transformation. In this session, we explored what happened when the Industry 4.0 playbook was applied to business operations, the shift we’re calling agentic operations.

Nicholas Galbincea of Metallus and Alan Hester of Nividous discussed where organizations could start, how a phased approach could take back-office automation from streamlined workflows to agentic workflows that flag their own exceptions, why the missing piece was often process data rather than more dashboards, and how leaders could bring their workforce along without creating fear or uncertainty.

• A practical approach to identifying which back-office processes were ready for automation and which were not
• How the crawl, walk, run approach could evolve operations from streamlined workflows to anomaly detection and eventually agentic AI operating within defined guardrails
• Why business and operational data alone were not enough, and how a process-data layer could reveal hidden bottlenecks
• A grounded, non-alarmist perspective on how automation could reshape roles and how leaders could address the fear of the unknown