Sight Machine today introduced Operator Agent, built to turn every plant-floor operator into a data-driven decision maker.
The goal is to empower line teams on the shop floor, including machine operators, production supervisors, line supervisors, maintenance managers, and process specialists – staff who are critical for driving productivity improvements.
Operator Agent is a set of software tools for the people who run and monitor the machines and lines on the plant floor.
It builds on the power of Sight Machine’s industrial AI platform, extending it with operator-specific capabilities using agentic AI, and illuminating production issues using 3D visualization through NVIDIA Omniverse.
Sight Machine’s AI Agents
Operator Agent uses multiple AI agents to make it easier for operators to maximize throughput, troubleshoot machine problems, reduce downtime, and improve quality.
The AI Agents have both an API for interacting with other software systems and a copilot natural language chat interface for Q&A or report generation by operators and engineers on the plant floor. Questions coming from the API or copilot are first routed to an orchestration agent – an LLM that processes the user’s intent, routes the questions to the appropriate tools or other agents, and aggregates responses. The analysis is performed by a set of specialist agents tuned to handle specific types of data analysis and predictive analytics. Each of these analysis agents has a set of previously trained and validated machine learning models, which help to ensure accuracy of the results.
The agents can reply in a variety of formats based on the use case. For example, when working via the API and responding to other software systems, they reply in short, well-defined messages. When working with users via the copilot interface, the agents can provide free-form reports with tables, charts, and other visualization tools.
How Operator Agent Turns Plant-Floor Operators into Data-Driven Decision Makers
Operators today face challenges including lack of access to actionable data-based insights, loss of institutional knowledge, and limited line-level visibility.
For industrial AI to improve manufacturing, it must reach all the way to the factory floor, where the daily decisions that determine productivity are made. That’s what makes Sight Machine’s Operator Agent so exciting.
For example, when a production line experiences unexpected equipment downtime, an operator can ask the Operator Agent, “Why did the packer on Line 3 stop?” The system analyzes real-time data and responds with both the root cause and recommended actions, while the 3D visualization shows exactly where the problem occurred on the line.
In addition to the software API and the copilot natural language chat interface, the solution includes an always-on AI agent (based on GPT-4) running underneath the visualization layer, monitoring the line for anomalies, raising issues to the attention of operators, and recommending action. This enables operators to decide on setting changes, identify root causes, and take corrective and preventive actions.
Every operator’s insight gets fed back into Sight Machine’s data foundation as human-labeled data, training AI algorithms to become smarter over time. Operator Agent preserves and amplifies institutional knowledge, turning every problem solved into a learning opportunity for the entire operation.
All agentic recommendations are surfaced directly in Sight Machine’s standard user interface and also integrated into the 3D digital twin, which is built with OpenUSD and NVIDIA Omniverse technologies and rendered in real time using NVIDIA A10 RTX GPUs on Azure.
Operator Agent integrates with Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry and Semantic Kernel.
Solutions for Every Role in the Manufacturing Enterprise
Operator Agent is the first of a new set of role-based solutions that Sight Machine will be introducing in the coming months. Each solution provides powerful tools relevant for each type of user that works with the Sight Machine platform.
Other role-specific solutions we will introduce are built for:
- Process engineers
- Data engineers and software developers, including our system integration partners
- Data scientists
- Connectivity and cloud solution architects
These role-based solutions are driven by the breadth of Sight Machine’s industrial AI platform – spanning from raw data intake through data transformation, digital twin creation, AI-driven manufacturing optimization, data interchange with enterprise data platforms and more.
Learn More
To learn more about Operator Agent, contact Sight Machine at https://sightmachine.com/contact/.
