The business of the future is adaptive

The journey to adaptive production is not just about addressing today's pressures, like rising costs and supply chain disruptions--it's about positioning businesses for long-term success in a world of constant change. "In the coming years," says Jana Kirchheim, director of manufacturing for Microsoft Germany, "I expect that new key technologies like copilots, small language models, high-performance computing, or the adaptive cloud approach will revolutionize the shop floor and accelerate industrial automation by enabling faster adjustments and re-programming for specific tasks." These capabilities make adaptive production a transformative force, enhancing responsiveness and opening doors to systems with increasing autonomy--designed to complement human ingenuity rather than replace it. These advances enable more than technical upgrades--they drive fundamental shifts in how manufacturers operate. John Hart, professor of mechanical engineering and director of MIT's Center for Advanced Production Technologies, explains that automation is "going from a rigid high-volume, low-mix focus"--where factories make large quantities of very few products--"to more flexible high-volume, high-mix, and low-volume, high-mix scenarios"--where many product types can be made in custom quantities.