In a special interaction, Sharad Kumar Agarwal, Chief Digital & Information Officer (CDIO), JK Tyre & Industries Ltd, shares insights into his digital leadership journey and the company’s roadmap towards building an AI-driven factory of the future. At JK Tyre, this vision goes far beyond incremental automation. It is about fundamentally reimagining manufacturing by embedding connectivity, intelligence, and autonomy at the core of its operations.
Rather than relying on conventional plant management systems, JK Tyre is moving towards factories orchestrated by AI, where decisions are taken in real time, digital twins simulate outcomes before execution, and agentic AI enables continuous collaboration between humans and machines. In this future state, manufacturing shifts from forecast-led planning to a demand-responsive, self-optimising ecosystem, where factories continuously learn and improve on their own.
Laying the groundwork: A 14-month digital reality check
To turn this vision into reality, JK Tyre began with a 14-month digital maturity assessment across all its manufacturing plants. The exercise acknowledged a hard truth, not all plants start from the same place. While newer facilities were relatively advanced, older legacy plants faced structural and technological gaps.
The assessment was structured around five foundational pillars. The first focused on digitising paper-based and manual processes to enable real-time data capture. The second addressed the need to consolidate fragmented data into a centralised, trusted data repository. Agarwal points out that strengthening the IT-OT infrastructure formed the third pillar, ensuring the backbone could support scalable digital transformation. The fourth pillar centred on reskilling the workforce, preparing teams to work confidently with data-driven and AI-enabled tools. Finally, the fifth pillar aimed at identifying high-impact use cases that could drive efficiency and reduce manual intervention.
“Security was not an afterthought in this journey. Cybersecurity has been embedded by design, with JK Tyre aligning its transformation roadmap to the Purdue Model, ensuring strict segregation between enterprise IT systems and operational technology layers,” adds Agarwal.
From data to wisdom: The transformation roadmap
JK Tyre’s roadmap follows a structured data-to-wisdom framework. The journey begins with connected plants, enabled by IT-OT integration, digital logbooks, and contextualised data. This foundation supports the transition to digital plants, where KPI-driven BI dashboards replace manual reporting and establish a single source of truth.
“The next phase focuses on intelligent plants, powered by digital twins and AI twins that provide predictive insights and enable proactive decision-making,” says Agarwal. The final destination is the smart plant, an environment driven by agentic AI, capable of autonomous planning, scheduling, optimisation, and continuous learning with minimal human intervention.
Building the future, one step at a time
For JK Tyre, the factory of the future is no longer a distant vision it is already beginning to take shape on the shopfloor. The company’s journey highlights the importance of starting with strong foundations; clean data, robust infrastructure, skilled people, and a clear roadmap.
For the broader manufacturing ecosystem, the message is clear. “The future of manufacturing will be shaped by intelligence, autonomy, and real-time decision-making. Those who design this future early will lead it and those who delay will be forced to catch up,” concludes Agarwal.
