AI for manufacturing and mobility.
Documentation, quality checks and tenders drafted by AI and signed by your engineers, on the factory floor or across a fleet.
What AI can do in manufacturing and mobility.
AI drafts and checks the paperwork a job cannot ship without: operation and maintenance manuals built from your own specs, findings pulled out of scanned inspection records, the compliance matrix behind a tender, and the month’s sensor exports written up as a report, whether those sensors sit on a production line or in a vehicle out on the road.
Where firms like yours start.
Drafts the operation and maintenance manuals from your own specs, with every claim traced to its source.
Runs the first pass across scanned inspection records and cites the cell or line behind each finding.
Assembles a first draft of the tender answers from past submissions and builds the compliance matrix beside it.
Writes up the month’s sensor exports as a report, with the arithmetic done in code.
The manuals and the bids started for you, and every figure traced to the document it came from. It also cuts the licences you no longer need, and lets the last job’s paperwork feed the next one.
The audit works out yours.
How we find where AI fits in manufacturing and mobility.
An AI Audit and Transformation starts on your own paperwork, fixed in scope and fee. We sit with the people who write the manuals and the bids, time the steps that repeat on every job, and hand back a costed, prioritised 12 month roadmap naming who owns each workflow. If nothing here is worth building, we say so.
The build is part of the same engagement, and what goes live is measured against the specialist hours the audit counted.
How we engage.
Most engagements start with the AI Audit and Transformation. What follows depends on what it surfaces: many teams keep us on as their Embedded AI Lead, and some commission a bespoke build where nothing off the shelf will fit. The AI Charter runs underneath whichever way it goes.
- AI Audit and Transformation Fixed in fee and scope: we measure where the specialist week goes and hand back a costed, prioritised 12 month roadmap, yours to keep.
- Embedded AI Lead We stay inside your team, build the plan into the day’s work and train whoever signs the reports.
- AI Charter It writes down what AI is used for here and who owns each workflow an auditor might ask about.
Related work.
A UK-listed lighting manufacturer whose sensor data we validated before any reporting was specified, and a cross-platform industrial IoT system built for equipment that has to keep reporting when the network drops.
FW Thorpe (Thorlux) Proving the data before specifying the report Occupancy records validated against the live dashboard, with board-ready reporting specified off the same SmartScan feed. ~6.5M Occupancy records validated 
Kioti Monitoring equipment through a dropped connection Ingestion sized for that rate, with operator tablets that keep working when the network goes and reconcile when it comes back. 1,000+ Data points per hour “We worked with OpenKit, as we wanted a company with domain expertise in LLMs to look at our strategy and test the concept. The study was focussed and really gave us a validation of our concept, a technical roadmap and prioritisation of the developments. The OpenKit team engaged well during the project, and through capture of workflows and interviews gained a good understanding of what we do. OpenKit provided a good technical study and exceptional value for money.”
Built to hold up under a procurement audit.
We hold the certifications procurement asks for, and where residency rules a cloud model out we deploy inside your own boundary. Private AI
ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and Cyber Essentials are certifications we hold, and we operate to UK GDPR. Solutions are designed to help meet the EU AI Act where it applies, so your compliance team can verify the work.
The questions that decide it.
The things engineering and procurement want settled first: scope, HSE duties, where the data sits, what it integrates with, and what it costs.
What does an AI consultancy for UK manufacturing actually do?
OpenKit audits where AI fits across a manufacturer’s floor and back office and where it does not, as the opening stage of an AI Audit and Transformation, then builds the workflow that earns its place on the stack you already run and trains the team to operate it. The work spans equipment and fleet telemetry turned into reporting a manager can read, document and specification drafting, searchable answers out of your own engineering archives, and internal assistants for the questions the team asks every day. The audit is fixed scope and fixed fee. OpenKit becomes your business’s embedded AI team: the people who ran your audit stay on to deliver your 12 month roadmap.
Will AI replace our engineers or operations team?
No. Every system we build keeps a person on the decision. For telemetry reporting, the arithmetic is pre-computed in code and the model writes narrative around verified numbers, with a trace on every call. For audit and specification review, the model drafts findings against your framework and a senior engineer accepts, edits or rejects them in a review interface that keeps an immutable audit trail.
How does this work with HSE obligations and the Health and Safety at Work Act?
The HSE set out its regulatory approach to AI in January 2026: AI sits inside the existing Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 framework, and employers must risk-assess any AI that affects workplace health and safety. Our audit covers the risk-assessment shape for each candidate workflow, identifies which uses fall in scope, and documents the controls so the assessment is defensible. We are not a notified body: the duty stays with you, and delivery is designed to operate under it.
Can we keep customer or audit data on-premises or in the UK jurisdiction?
Yes, and we have shipped both patterns. For UK-region cloud we target AWS Bedrock in eu-west-2 with Azure UK South as a fallback, and keep Langfuse traces in the same jurisdiction. For full on-premises we deploy open-weight models on client-owned GPU and Kubernetes, the pattern specified for the international oil and gas pipeline-integrity pilot. Customer telemetry, audit content and proprietary methodology stay inside the jurisdiction throughout.
Will this integrate with our SCADA, MES, ERP and time-series databases?
Yes. We integrate with SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite and Epicor, and with the SCADA and MES estate vendor-agnostically through OPC-UA and MQTT where relevant. Time-series workloads have been delivered on PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB, verified on the FW Thorpe SmartScan engagement. We build on top of the data plane you already run rather than introducing a new one.
What about liability if the AI gets something wrong?
The architecture and the engagement both carry the liability story. The model never makes a safety-critical decision, and a person signs off every output that lands outside a controlled internal use. Every audit documents a risk register with technical and operational mitigations written into the specification: hallucinated arithmetic mitigated by pre-computing numbers in code, runaway cost mitigated by scheduled generation, data residency mitigated by the deployment choice.
How is a manufacturing AI engagement structured?
Every engagement opens with the audit stage of an AI Audit and Transformation, which is fixed scope, fixed fee and scoped up front, mapping where AI fits across your SCADA, MES and ERP estate and where it should not go. The build that follows puts that work live on the same estate with the team trained on it. An Embedded AI Lead can carry delivery afterwards, and a Bespoke Build is scoped against what the audit surfaces.
What does this cost for an SME manufacturer or a mid-market industrial?
The audit is fixed fee and fixed scope, agreed before kickoff, and what follows is priced after the audit against what it surfaces: the transformation build, an Embedded AI Lead on retainer, or a Bespoke Build. We share indicative figures on a discovery call. SME manufacturers in scope for Made Smarter, the government’s manufacturing adoption programme, can route part of the cost through the regional support where eligible.
Have you delivered this kind of work in UK manufacturing before?
Yes. The FW Thorpe / Thorlux SmartScan discovery is published on our portfolio: a UK-listed lighting group, SmartScan sensor data turned into three-tier executive, facilities and department reporting. The international oil and gas engagement, kept anonymised, specified an on-premises pilot for pipeline-integrity audits. Kioti, a cross-platform industrial IoT system handling over a thousand data points an hour, rounds out the offline-tolerant pattern the factory floor needs.
How does OpenKit compare to larger manufacturing AI consultancies?
The enterprise firms (QuantumBlack, Cambridge Consultants, Faculty (now part of Accenture)) staff multi-year programmes for large manufacturers. We are sized for UK SMEs and mid-market industrials, with a fixed-fee audit a buyer can self-qualify against rather than a procurement cycle, and we default to UK-region cloud and on-premises sovereign deployment, both shipped on named UK references. OpenKit becomes your business’s embedded AI team: the people who ran your audit stay on to deliver your 12 month roadmap.
Find your first workflow.
We start with a conversation, audit where AI actually pays back, and build the first automation into how your team already works. We reply within one working day.