The factory that thinks: Why intelligent manufacturing needs more humans: Gopi Thangavel, Group CIO, L&T
Will AI take over the factory? For Gopi Thangavel, Group CIO of Larsen & Toubro, the answer is a firm no, and he has the history to back it up.
Speaking at the Intelligent Manufacturing 500 conference, Gopi Thangavel drew on two unlikely sources: Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal, which shows why a single bottleneck can undo a factory full of perfect machines, and William Stanley Jevons’s 1865 The Coal Question, which explains why cheaper, more efficient technology tends to expand work rather than shrink it. From there he moved through the real world of manufacturing, from temperature-sensitive medicines losing potency on the road, to digital twins that let engineers fail safely before touching a ₹25 crore cylinder, to the shift from generative to agentic AI.
His conclusion is that the hardest parts of intelligent manufacturing are not technical at all. They are security, accountability and a workforce that...
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