Guide · Manufacturing

AI in manufacturing

Which federal AI use cases name manufacturing, factories or supply chains, which agencies they belong to, and what NIST's manufacturing programs and the Department of Energy's manufacturing office say about themselves. Counted from the public inventory with a stated keyword rule.

Updated 29 October 2026 · Every number links to its source. The inventory was read on 28 October 2026; the NIST, Manufacturing USA and DOE pages on 29 October 2026.

The public record

Federal agencies list their AI use cases each year and OMB compiles the lists into one public file of 3,611 rows.[3][1] There is no manufacturing agency in that file. The government's manufacturing programs sit in the Department of Commerce, at NIST, and in the Department of Energy, and the file excludes the use cases of the Department of War, as OMB's README names it (the Department of Defense), which holds the defense industrial base.[3] So this guide counts rows by what they say rather than by who filed them: a use case whose name or stated problem names manufacturing, a factory, a supply chain, industrial activity, additive manufacturing or 3D printing.[1][2]

The counting rule

A row is counted when its use_case_name or its problem_solved text contains, as a whole word and ignoring case, a word beginning "manufactur", "factory", "factories", "supply chain", "supply chains", "industrial", "additive manufacturing" or "3D print" in any form.[1][2] "Additive" on its own is not a term, because it would catch a statistical method. The rule is a text match. It keeps rows that use a word in another sense, such as "Azure Data Factory", a software product, and it misses rows that describe factory work without one of the words. The matched rows are published beside this page with the terms each one matched.[1]

How many, and where

The rule matches 44 of the 3,611 use cases.[1] Of those, 26 are marked deployed, 2 are pilots and 16 are before deployment; none is retired.[1] So 59% of the matched rows are deployed, against 29% for the whole file.[1] The word "manufacturing" or one of its relatives appears in 25 rows and "supply chain" or "supply chains" in 18; "additive manufacturing" is in 2, "factory" in 1, and no row names 3D printing.[1]

The Department of Health and Human Services has the largest share, 11 rows, 10 of them from the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates drug manufacturing.[1] The Department of Justice has 7, NASA 6, the Department of Energy 4 and the Department of Homeland Security 3; 3 agencies have one row each.[1] The Department of Commerce, which houses NIST, has none that match.[1]

Data: manufacturing-by-stage-2025.csv · manufacturing-by-term-2025.csv

What the rows describe

By the topic the agency chose, science leads with 10 rows, then health and medical with 9 and law enforcement with 7.[1][2] The FDA rows are regulatory: tools that read drug applications for the facilities named in them, a dashboard for the assessment of manufacturing sites, and "CDER Regulatory Science Research (RSR) Projects AI for Process Control in Advanced Manufacturing", filed under science.[1] The Department of Justice's 7 are a data-integration product at ATF, four Drug Enforcement Administration tools on where illicit drugs are made and moved, and two supply-chain risk tools.[1]

The rows that describe making things are fewer. NASA's 6 include "Identifying flaws in manufacturing of composites", a calibration framework for the thermal modelling of metal additive manufacturing, and a deployed robotic-arm toolpathing tool at Marshall Space Flight Center.[1] The Department of Energy's 4 are laboratory rows, among them "ORNL: AI for Advanced Manufacturing" at Oak Ridge, marked high-impact, and a Brookhaven project on guiding the synthesis of thin films.[1] The United States Mint lists predictive maintenance for its manufacturing equipment, before deployment, and the Federal Reserve Board a deployed "Manufacturer Sentiment Analysis".[1] 4 of the 44 matched rows are marked high-impact: the Oak Ridge row, two Justice license plate reader tools and a VA pharmacy inventory system.[1]

Data: manufacturing-use-cases-2025.csv · manufacturing-by-topic-2025.csv

NIST and Manufacturing USA

NIST appears in the inventory as a bureau of the Department of Commerce with 7 of the department's 223 rows, against 157 for NOAA.[1] All seven are general tools, "Google Gemini", "Grammarly", "Library Market Research GenAI Tools Pilot" and four others, and none carries a stage, a topic or a classification in the file.[1] None names manufacturing.[1]

NIST's manufacturing work is outside the inventory. Its Manufacturing Extension Partnership describes itself as a program of "nearly 1,400 trusted manufacturing advisors and experts" at more than 450 service locations, and its page announces a $40 million pilot in two areas, additive manufacturing and critical minerals, with a funding opportunity "expected to be announced later in 2026".[4] Manufacturing USA, the network of institutes whose program office is at NIST, lists 18 institutes; its technology filter tags two of them under "Super Intelligence", one under "Digital Twins" and three under "Modeling and Simulation", and the robotics institute's description names "software and artificial intelligence" among its disciplines.[5]

The Department of Energy

The Department of Energy's Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office says its mission is "to drive and inspire innovation to transform materials and manufacturing" for secure supply chains, and that it is a suboffice of the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation; its newsletter page names three sister offices, for advanced mining and mineral production, manufacturing deployment, and analysis and strategy.[6] Its three programs are secure material supply chains, next-generation materials and processes, and energy technology manufacturing and workforce.[6] The office's own text on the page does not mention AI (the department's site menu does, under its new name, "super intelligence"); the department's matched inventory rows come from its national laboratories, not from this office.[6][1]

The earlier version of this site ran six general posts on factories, product design, robotics and predictive maintenance. They are retired; what a federal reader can check is the list above and the pages behind it.

Counting caveats

• The rule is a text match on two fields. "Azure Data Factory" matches "factory" and a caribou study matches "industrial"; a row about shop-floor work that uses none of the words is missed.[1]
• Department of War use cases are excluded from the file, so defense manufacturing is absent by design.[3]
• The problem statement is required only for pre-deployment, pilot and deployed use cases, so retired rows can match on their name alone.[2]
• AI used for basic or applied research is excluded unless it is meant for agency use, which limits what the national laboratories list.[3]
• Stage, topic and the high-impact answer are each one choice by the reporting agency.[2]

See also: AI in engineering, AI in mining and critical minerals, AI in defense, AI in food safety, AI in the public sector, Generative AI in government, and the data story 3,611 uses of AI on the federal list.

Sources

1. Office of Management and Budget, 2025 Federal Agency AI Use Case Inventory, file of individually reported use cases (3,611 rows; the repository says "as of April 13, 2026"), counted by this site: 2025_individually_reported_AI_use_cases.csv. Read 28 October 2026.
2. Office of Management and Budget, 2025 inventory data dictionary. Read 28 October 2026.
3. Office of Management and Budget, 2025 Federal Agency AI Use Case Inventory repository, README (summary, submission schedule and exclusion criteria). Read 28 October 2026.
4. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), program page. Read 29 October 2026.
5. Manufacturing USA (the program office is at NIST), Institutes, the list of institutes with its technology filters. Read 29 October 2026.
6. U.S. Department of Energy, Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, office page. Read 29 October 2026.

How this page was counted: one row per use case in OMB's file, read on 28 October 2026; a row matches the manufacturing rule when its use_case_name or problem_solved text contains, as a whole word and ignoring case, a word beginning "manufactur", "factory", "factories", "supply chain", "supply chains", "industrial", "additive manufacturing" or "3D print" in any form; no agency is excluded. NIST rows are those whose agency_bureau is exactly "NIST". Stages, topics, classifications and high-impact answers are those columns as given, with an empty cell counted as "no stage given", "no topic given", "no classification given" or "no answer". The CSV files beside this page carry the counts, the source address and the read date; README.txt beside them repeats the rule.