CESMII – The Smart Manufacturing Institute today announced the beta launch of the Industrial Information Interoperability eXchange (i3X™), an open, standards-based API designed to enable seamless interoperability across manufacturing systems, platforms and applications. Manufacturers today face a common challenge: fragmented OT and IT systems that trap data in silos, constraining productivity, innovation and visibility across operations. These limitations slow AI adoption, and hinder improvements in efficiency, quality, supply chain resilience and labor productivity initiatives.

Jim Davis, UCLA Office of Advanced Research Computing, Vice Provost IT (CIO/CTO) & Professor Emeritus, executive oversight CESMII, highlights the findings of three industry-academic-government studies conducted between 2020 and 2025 on Al in Smart Manufacturing/I4.0 enterprises. These studies provide direction and benchmarks for CESMIl’s operational Al and data application strategies in the manufacturing industry. The studies were based on interests by the Advanced Manufacturing Program, NSF, the Office of Advanced Manufacturing, NIST, and joint interests by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, DOE.

In this ARC Advisory Group article, analyst Colin Masson examines how CESMII’s i3X initiative addresses the context engineering gap limiting Industrial AI at scale. By standardizing data models in JSON Schema, enabling MCP server integration, and uniting a growing ecosystem of automation and cloud partners, i3X advances CESMII’s federal mandate to reduce smart manufacturing implementation costs and time by 50%.