Assembling the Future: Visions of Manufacturing in the Age of AI

Baukunst's latest study group report, Assembling the Future: Manufacturing + AI, is now available to read in full here.

Our first study group explored the market potential of mushrooms, and our second charted out how generative AI is changing CAD. Our most recent study group is a deep dive on one of this decade's most important issues: how AI is shifting manufacturing, employment, and the shape of human work.

Members of the Baukunst collective, startup founders, and guest experts, including leaders from manufacturing giants like NVIDIA, Flex, Tesla, Rivian, and Apple, stepped up to share both questions and experiences working with AI. We explored how AI is being used by some of the world's largest contract manufacturers and best startups, ranging from agentic procurement and negotiation to AI-assisted industrial engineering and humanoid robots.

Assembling the Future looks at:

• 4 ways AI is already changing manufacturing work today and why they differ from historic waves of automation. We document an expanding scope of AI capabilities, from "AI as API" to a company's context, to AI that augments human efficiency, to AI colleagues, to AI-native manufacturing.
• What AI-native manufacturing looks like: we talked to founders building vertically integrated factories where AI touches everything from design to procurement. What are they learning about machine-human collaboration?
• How AI will affect industrial labor and employment? These are the elephants in the room when it comes to this topic. We learned from contemporary labor experts and historical case studies to form our own perspective on how to anticipate AI's effects.

For insights into the future of manufacturing, industrial engineering, and AI-driven innovation, get the full report.

Baukunst Study Groups are short, collaborative projects where the participants dive into new areas of inquiry at the frontiers of technology and society. Each Study Group is designed to inspire collective members to share domain knowledge and apply their brains, bodies, and spirits to wholly new directions. Learn more about Study Groups here.