India, Oct. 2 -- What was once just some occasional cherry on the cake, has now become an all-you-want seasoning. The bagel of manufacturing is now surpassing the dough-nut phase of intelligent automation.

From the initial, and obvious, surface-areas of immediate sweet-spots like banking, retail and IT; advanced automation breakthroughs like robots, visual intelligence, AI, connectivity, analytics and sensors are now entering the more savoury sides of business landscape. Some factories in India are designing and making better products, making them faster, making them with smarter QA, and in machines that can be not just run but maintained without too much sweat. It's the turn of factories now to smell this new technology-spread.

Whether...