There’s nothing that the technology and communications industry likes more than the arrival of a next generation. For example, look at the comms industry and the clamour that centres around the launch of the next generation of mobile around a decade after the launch of the previous iteration. The clamour for 6G, set for commercial launch arrival in 2030, is really beginning to start in earnest, despite 5G being nowhere near pervasive nor diffuse.
In engineering, however, things move a little different. Despite the daily emergence of innovation in design, manufacturing and collaboration technology, the market has not been hung up so much on generations. But with the growing emergence of Industry 5.0, could all this change?
Before digging deeper into Industry 5.0, let’s look at the past and Industry 4.0. In terms of a basic definition, Industry 4.0 essentially refers to the fourth industrial revolution and the transformation of manufacturing processes, promoting connected manufacturing and the digital convergence of industry, businesses and other processes. Falling into this definition are the likes of robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT) and automation. Industry 4.0 also includes real-world use cases such as supply chain management, logistics, warehousing and cyber security.
What this reflects is just how modern engineering processes have evolved over the past few decades to the point where there are many interconnected disciplines taking place, often at the same time – and there is a fundamental need for this. Over the course of the lifetime of a product or service, everything in the cycle of conception to operation and maintenance will have changed to some degree, from a minor tweak to a major overhaul.
“Engineering works differently today, and not just in the tools we use, but in how we think about the role of the engineer,” says Chris Brown, senior vice-president of sales at Fathom Manufacturing. “[We should be] focused on empowering our engineers to do the work they want to be doing, solving problems, collaborating with customers and driving innovation, not chasing down tacit knowledge or manually reviewing drawings for the thousandth time.
“We [have been] using technology and data systems not as decision-makers, but as research assistants that quietly run behind the scenes, surfacing historical learnings, analysing risks and proactively flagging potential issues, all while the engineer stays focused on the bigger picture. That’s a huge shift. 10 years ago, it was about automation replacing labour. Today, it’s about augmentation giving our engineers superpowers.”
Brown’s main point is that when you give engineers advanced tools and support, they can deliver better designs faster, with fewer iterations, and with more confidence in the outcomes – all of which he says is a huge win for both the engineering team and the customer. That means Industry 5.0 can elevate design and engineering teams into a new kind of role, becoming what Brown calls “tech-augmented innovators” at the centre of the process. This will see firms capture the speed and power of Industry 4.0 technologies and then augment it with insight and creativity.
“Design and engineering teams are no longer just behind-the-scenes executors, they’re front and centre, driving innovation through a partnership of human and machine. That is the essence of Industry 5.0 in our view, putting people at the heart of advanced manufacturing, armed with the best technology, to achieve things neither could do alone.”
One of the basic truths in manufacturing is that there are few industries like it when it comes to dealing with change. In manufacturing, change is a constant, and interconnections are taking on a whole new paradigm for engineering with the advent of advanced comms technologies. Breakthroughs in communications technologies, such as standalone 5G networks, can open up even more new vistas in terms of the possibilities of design and manufacturing. Industry 5.0 can raise this to higher levels, not just in how it is carried out but also the personal and environmental contexts of processes.
A wasteless world
Michael Rada is generally accepted as the founder of Industry 5.0. He stresses that it not a sales tool or a buzzword, but a new global ecosystem that helps to reduce the negative impact of industrial development on the global ecosystem.
In terms of chronology, Rada believes that Industry 5.0 was launched at the end of 2015, but its principles have been implemented since 2013 by the industrial upcycling methodology applied in companies and businesses mainly in Czech Republic.
He says that the aim for Industry 5.0 is to “build a wasteless world for all”, based on the principles of systematic waste prevention and recognising five types of waste – physical, social, urban, process, wasting of time – that are applicable everywhere to factories, entrepreneurs, corporations, homes and governments. Rada notes that the United Nations (UN) first mentioned Industry 5.0 in December 2021, then three years later integrated Industry 5.0 in its Global waste management outlook 2024 report.
While observing that the number of businesses, companies, corporations and governments adopting the term Industry 5.0 is now growing rapidly, Michael Rada believes that a significant volume of funding has been made available for projects utilising Industry 5.0. He highlights that the biggest funded Industry 5.0 project of 2023 was a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation project in Canada, which secured $2.1bn from the Canadian government and which is being built assembled and tested on production lines using Industry 5.0 techniques. These include AI, automation, co-bots, augmented reality and assemblers.
Such technologies and techniques are now firmly established in the world of connected engineering. Speaking to Computer Weekly in February 2025, Dassault Systèmes senior vice-president Gian Paolo Bassi said the conversation of its sector has now evolved from Industry 4.0, taking an evolutionary step from a marketplace that which was focused on automation, productivity and innovation without taking into account the effect of technological changes in society as outlined by the likes of Rada.
“The industry has decided that it’s time for an evolution. It’s called Industry 5.0,” he stated. “At the intersection of the experience economy, there is a new, compelling necessity to be sustainable, to create a circular economy. So then, at the intersection, [we have] the generative [AI] economy.”
Dassault first revealed it was working with generative AI (GenAI) design principles in 2024, and as the practice has evolved within the company, Bassi outlined that it now captures two fundamental concepts. The first is the ability of AI to create content based on language models that comprise details of processes, business models, designs of parts assemblies, specifications and manufacturing practices. These models, he said, would not be traditional, generic, compute-intensive models such as ChatGPT; instead, they would be vertical, industry-specific and trained on engineering content and technical documentation.
“We can now build large models of everything, which is a virtual twin, and we can get to a level of sophistication where new ideas can come in and be tested, and much more knowledge can be put into the innovation process. This is a tipping point,” he said in February 2025. “It’s not a technological change, it’s a technological expansion – a very important one. Generative AI can create content and, more importantly, know-how and knowledge that can be used by our customers immediately.”
In Bassi’s belief, this is what AI is best at: exploiting the large models of industrial practices, with the most important benefit of addressing customer needs as the capabilities of AI are translated into the industrial world, offering a pathway for engineers to save precious time in research and spend more time on being creative in design, without massive, network-intensive models, while being able to design and manufacture with knowledge of the downstream requirements for components and their sustainability.
Bassi was adamant that, conscious of the actual phenomenon or not, the concept of Industry 5.0 was being adopted by every one of the company’s customers, putting in place policies to support the concept and looking to generate sustainability gains when deploying software in their industry, improving the safety and ergonomics of workplaces, as well as workflows.
Sights set on edge AI
Computer vision is very much part of the Industry 5.0 toolkit and will inevitably be deployed to enable engineering businesses to use advanced comms and AI at the edge of networks more efficiently and sustainably.
In an advancement of this field, global industrial hardware company OnLogic and computer vision software firm viso.ai are teaming up to “revolutionise” the deployment and scalability of edge AI vision solutions looking to address what they believe are the critical challenge of simplifying and scaling complex vision workloads in an era where real-time data analysis and automation are said to be paramount.
Explaining the rationale for their partnership, the companies say industries ranging from manufacturing and construction to retail and smart cities are looking to use computer vision to drive operational efficiency, enhance quality control, manage workforce safety and gain actionable insights. Yet they caution that to date the complexities associated with hardware selection, software integration and deployment are presenting significant barriers to entry.
The companies say that their partnership will mean users can expect to see integrated offerings that include OnLogic’s industrial computers pre-configured with viso.ai’s platform, enabling them to deploy and scale their edge AI vision initiatives. They add that they will be able to deliver systems that can focus on delivering pre-validated and optimised solutions tailored to meet the specific needs of various industries, including manufacturing, logistics, construction, retail and smart cities.
Ultimately, while the forthcoming era of smart manufacturing will see Industry 5.0 technologies that encompass hyper-personalised production to real-time decision-making, they will not aim to replace human instinct and insight. Instead, they will embrace these capabilities and not try to automate people out of the process.
Read part two: Continuing our look at Industry 5.0 with what effect it is having on those deploying the technology.