Why manufacturing is failing to leverage AI: and how to fix it

Manufactures are investing heavily in AI, hoping it will unlock efficiency, accuracy, and competitive advantage. But despite the excitement, many initiatives stall or fail to deliver meaningful results. The problem isn’t the AI technology itself — it’s the disconnected, unstructured information sitting behind it. This article explores why manufacturing is struggling to benefit from AI and how the right information foundations can change everything.

Across the manufacturing sector, AI is being hailed as the next big competitive advantage. Yet many organisations are struggling to realise its full potential. The issue isn’t the technology – it’s the state of the information feeding it.

The Real Problem: Disconnected, Unstructured Content

Most manufacturers operate with information scattered across Teams, SharePoint, email, shared drives, and even legacy paper archives. When content is fragmented like this, several issues quickly emerge.

1. Multiple versions of the same file circulate without anyone knowing which is correct.
2. AI tools pull outdated or conflicting information, leading to inaccurate insights.
3. Engineers and production teams waste time searching, verifying, and re verifying documentation.
4. Compliance, audit trails, and governance break down, increasing operational risk.

In short: AI can’t fix content chaos. If the inputs are broken, the intelligence will be too.

The Hidden Bottleneck: Lack of Structure & Governance

AI thrives on clarity — clean metadata, consistent naming, reliable version control, and well managed lifecycle governance. But manufacturers often lack:

Without these foundations, even the smartest AI becomes nothing more than an expensive experiment.

The Solution: Build the Right Information Foundations

At Crown Information Management, we help manufacturers modernise the way they manage information, so their digital and AI initiatives actually deliver value.

Our approach focuses on:

• Bringing Structure to Content

We classify, organise, and connect your documents so that everything exists in the right place, and in the right context.

• Enforcing Governance

Strong version control, access rules, retention policies, and audit trails ensure your information is accurate, secure, and compliant.

• Creating a Unified Source of Truth

Instead of documents scattered across Teams, SharePoint, email, and drives, we bring information together in a standardised, well managed ecosystem.

When this foundation is in place, AI becomes reliable, powerful, and genuinely transformative, because it’s running on clean, trusted data rather than disconnected files.

Want to find out more? Contact our team of experts today!