How AI is Powering the Next Industrial Revolution
At the recent Hannover Messe 2025, Lenovo unveileded new research highlighting a major shift in the manufacturing industry across EMEA with companies set to increase their AI spending by 106% over the next 12 months.
The findings, part of Lenovo’s CIO Playbook 2025, reveal that 79% of manufacturing AI projects implemented in the past year met or exceeded expectations—the highest success rate of any sector, these insights underscore Lenovo’s leadership in AI-driven transformation.
The manufacturing industry is distinguishing itself from other verticals with its increased investment in AI, split between Interpretive (44%) and Generative (44%) AI tools. This comes as the industry looks to meet its top business priorities for 2025 by enhancing decision making, improving customer experience, and increasing profit growth. To reach those goals, 67% are using on-prem, private, and/or hybrid as their primary infrastructure to approach AI workloads.
Successful AI implementation in manufacturing is driven by three main factors: how easily AI can be integrated with existing systems; having enough hybrid computing and storage resources; and securing the right budget along with committed leadership. However, manufacturers still face major challenges, including high infrastructure and network costs, difficulties in scaling AI across the business, and a lack of affordable AI expertise
“Manufacturing companies are prioritizing decision-making, compliance, and employee productivity as they adopt AI to enhance operational efficiency and drive profitability. Success with AI will depend on a careful approach to integration, with system compatibility and adequate compute resources being key success factors. A historical lack of software technology investment prioritization in manufacturing is behind many firms’ integration challenges, especially with legacy systems and struggles with scaling AI initiatives across global operations,” said Jonathan Wu, Chief Technology Officer of Smart Manufacturing, Lenovo.
Driving AI-Enabled Transformation in Manufacturing
Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA solutions is designed to help accelerate AI adoption and boost business productivity by fast-tracking agentic AI that can reason, plan, and take action to reach goals faster. The validated, full-stack AI solutions enable manufacturers to quickly build and deploy AI agents for a broad range of high-demand use cases, increasing productivity, agility, and trust while accelerating the next wave of AI reasoning for the new era of agentic AI.
Lenovo has developed a range of AI-powered services for the manufacturing industry, including:
LeForecast: LeForecast unveils a time series foundation model pretrained on extensive data from various domains. With its multimodal capabilities and agentic sensing system, LeForecast autonomously generates precise forecasts and insightful guidance reports, empowering businesses to make timely and informed decisions.
Lenovo’s Supply Chain Intelligence: Continuously analyzes supply chain data to identify potential issues and resolve them in real time through process automation and AI modeling.
Lenovo’s ESG Navigator: Provides 30+ AI models in energy efficiency and energy conservation scenarios, enhancing energy awareness to support progress towards sustainability goals.
Lenovo Robotic Inspection: Digital inspection platform that boasts a range of AI capabilities and employs digital twin technologies to observe, monitor, document and analyze the condition and quality of equipment, processes and environment, provide real time alarm/warning, and generate insightful inspection reports.
At the event, one of Lenovo’s AI Innovator Program members, Trifork, demonstrated its AI-powered vision quality management for manufacturing solution. The solution leverages Lenovo ThinkEdge services and Trifork Vision AI to automate quality control processes, reduce defects, and enhance production efficiency.
Trifork Vision AI Quality Inspection is powered by the Lenovo Validated Design (LVD) and delivers powerful capabilities that streamline and accelerate the process of identifying product quality issues, enabling manufacturers to quickly assess the tangible impact of operational changes on product quality, costs, and customer satisfaction. Powered by Lenovo ThinkEdge SE360 V2 and SE455 V3 servers with NVIDIA GPUs, the solution delivers high-performance inferencing, automated quality inspections, and actionable insights—at scale and with speed. Leveraging the combined power of computer vision, edge computing, and AI-driven analytics, this solution delivers faster, more accurate, and fully automated defect detection, driving greater efficiency and consistent product reliability.
The solution is already in use across a wide range of applications—from detecting corrosion on offshore machinery, to spotting chips, cracks, or dents in products before they leave the production line.
For more information: www.lenovo.com
