The manufacturing industry appears to be entering a period of significant change, as many organizations explore how AI agents can help transform internal operations, one busted data silo at a time. Manufacturers have already started investing in the technology they’ll need to stay ahead of the curve and give themselves a competitive advantage. Here’s what you need to know to prepare yourself for the coming changes to keep your company forging ahead — not falling behind.

The modern data estate

Traditionally, manufacturers have siloed their data and logic within disparate business applications and systems, making cross-organizational collaboration and data sharing extremely difficult and slowing innovation and growth. But as AI, especially in the form of agents, is disrupting the status quo, we believe that forward-thinking companies will greatly benefit from overhauling their current data environment into the modern data estate. Its three key components, which will be crucial for manufacturers to focus on in the coming year, are supply chain performance, smart manufacturing and connected products.

Supply chain performance

There is a huge opportunity this year for manufacturers to start tapping into new supply chain data sources and thinking beyond just traditional ones. This will require reaching upstream to suppliers (for information such as data on raw materials) and downstream to customers (for data on how they’re using products or any issues they may be encountering). This coincides with manufacturers’ increasing feeling that it’s important to achieve much more efficient, scalable ways of attaining full visibility of their supply chains.

The partnership between Snowflake and SAP and the availability of the SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) is designed to support bidirectional data sharing and near real-time access to SAP data products through zero-copy integration, depending on customer configuration. This can help organizations improve enterprise and supply chain visibility by bringing SAP data together with the rest of a company’s enterprise data.

Some of our customers are already investing in enterprise visibility with BDC by focusing on sales, supply chains, forecasting and the relationship between their financials and inventory planning — and realizing the true value of their data estates. They report experiencing a paradigm shift in their operations as they reduce data replication and build a stronger sense of trust in their own data. By creating a single source of truth, they’re generating a 360-degree view of all their data, empowering leaders of all levels within their organizations — from executives to business SMEs — to understand exactly what’s going on across the business. This is true whether leaders want greater insights on overall inventory planning or supply runs to shipping. As more manufacturers make increasing enterprise visibility a priority, those who do not will find themselves at a distinct disadvantage.

Smart manufacturing

Nearly everything observable on your shop floor is data, and that data is crucial for improving operations, from efficiency to product quality. In 2026, manufacturers will start leveraging data from a wide variety of shop floor sources, such as cameras and sensors, not just to find root causes of problems and improve quality and yield but to conduct real-time interdiction and quality assessment or optimize energy usage.

At Snowflake, we’re building partnerships to securely and easily bring data to the cloud from shop floor equipment, whether it’s state of the art or legacy (the latter of which many manufacturers still work with today).

This year, COOs have shop floor modernization top of mind and are focusing on three key themes:

• Quickly bringing vision technology into production lines for inline quality monitoring and worker safety.

• Optimizing capacity within the four walls of new production facilities through AI-driven optimization.

• Optimizing inventory using AI in calculations to make real-time decisions about raw material and finished goods levels.

In one customer example, Lindt & Sprüngli implemented a Snowflake technology partner, HighByte, to acquire data from all of their shop floor equipment, bring it to the cloud and enable an online solution for tasks such as predictive maintenance and efficiency management. And it only took 12 months for Lindt and HighByte to get it up and running. More manufacturers will begin prioritizing moving shop floor data to the cloud this year, especially once they experience the transformative impact it will have on their organizations.

Connected products

Manufacturers who build products that are powered — such as cars, appliances or any type of Internet of Things-enabled device — and that also have a network and generate data, are getting a wealth of valuable information for improving customer relationships, creating new lines of business and feeding back into product design and manufacturing. We believe that manufacturers will begin sending more of this data to the cloud this year before it gets integrated back into other business processes through the emergence of the Unified Namespace.

The Unified Namespace is the convergence of:

• IT data: ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle

• OT data: shop floor/operations technology

• IoT data: the manufacturer’s product

Traditionally, integrating the five layers of the industrial automation stack — equipment, SCADA, MES, ERP and cloud — has been challenging for manufacturers due to different protocols, APIs and point-to-point integration techniques. But now the cloud, and specifically Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, can serve as the data store where all of that data is unified. Enterprise manufacturers are also starting to move away from considering IT, OT and IoT to be three separate areas of opportunity with the emergence of Unified Namespace. This convergence is helping companies drive new revenue by improving the customer experience, monetizing services through connected products and enabling predictive, proactive insights at the edge.

AI everywhere, AI inside everything

Moving forward from this year and into the foreseeable future, we strongly feel it will be necessary for companies to be able to talk to their data as AI begins to permeate everything, infusing intelligence into every decision and device, transforming every process, product and possibility. Snowflake Intelligence makes this possible, and we’re seeing many customers across our industry adopting it for a variety of use cases. For instance, users are leveraging semantic models to ask questions such as “Show me where I have particularly low inventory, and what do I need to do to replenish it?” “What risks exist in transportation to replenish stock?” or “Could weather potentially impact on-time replenishment?”

Getting the answers to such questions becomes possible when you have all your data in one environment as well as the AI tools that can make sense of that data. Pull the relevant data to answer your questions and leverage your AI models to recommend the next best course of action — Snowflake Intelligence makes this possible, and that’s how customers are working with their data in 2026 and beyond.

These are just some of the insights we have about the changes on the horizon for manufacturing. For more information on industry predictions and how retailers and consumer goods companies can prepare, watch our Manufacturing AI Data Predictions 2026 webinar and download Snowflake AI + Data Predictions 2026 now.