Industry 5.0 places human well-being and sustainability at its core. The concept, introduced in the European Commission’s report ‘Industry 5.0: Towards more sustainable, resilient and human-centric industry,’ champions a future where humans and technology collaborate, combining human creativity and critical thinking with the efficiency of machines. This creates a workplace that values human skills while using technology to empower employees and minimize environmental impact. 

While Industry 4.0 focused on automating processes and connecting machines through technologies like AI and IoT to increase efficiency, Industry 5.0 builds on this foundation by shifting the focus to human-machine collaboration. It emphasizes the importance of human skills like creativity and critical thinking alongside technological advancements such as collaborative robots, advanced AI, and human-machine interfaces.

Public discourse still predominantly revolves around Industry 4.0, as the technologies are still being widely adopted and integrated, with many businesses still in the process of implementing automation and data exchange. Transitioning to Industry 5.0 requires a different paradigm for prioritizing investments in new technologies, emphasizing real-time communication between people, humans to machines, and machines to humans; processing of feedback from plant floor staff; and workforce training.

This shift is driven by the understanding that humans will continue to be important in manufacturing processes, and that resilient and sustainable manufacturing requires making necessary human operations as efficient as possible, not just machine operations.

Among the tasks carried out in factories, some can only or better be done by humans, such as ensuring physical safety, assets, and quality. The idea behind the Smart Factory System (SFS), which o2OG is developing and promoting, is that by concentrating human resources in these areas and using AI to reflect various inputs from the factory floor, such as real-time machine performance data and worker feedback, it is possible to achieve truly human-centric manufacturing.