Insights from Andrew Patterson, Chief Technologist - Product
For engineering design – where fully validated and trustworthy AI solutions are still emerging – finding frameworks for adoption is the key to industry-wide change.
In response, promising strategies are starting to emerge, connecting agile AI innovators with advanced engineering design. They surface solutions fast, align technology developers with highly regulated manufacturers, and the entire supply chain can learn from the outcomes.
We saw the approach in action throughout the Innovate UK Agentic AI Pioneers Prize, an industry-led, hackathon-style competition which surfaced compelling examples of AI use tackling real industrial problems.
The winning solution demonstrated how industrial robot design could be reduced from weeks to minutes. But the value of this competition goes beyond its outcomes.
It worked because it broke down barriers between emerging technology and highly regulated industries. In the advanced manufacturing category, digital expertise within the High Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult (NCC, MTC and CPI) helped bridge the gap.
Here’s what we learnt from the competition.
Framed by industry, freedom to innovate
The starting point for the Agentic AI Pioneers Prize was to set clear, industrially relevant challenges that gave technology developers a meaningful problem to solve.
Setting the right challenge is harder than you might think. Challenges of value should relate to specific, real-world use cases, but entrants also need freedom for creativity and new ideas.
To get it right, we convened an industrial user group, building on a knowledge base developed through the NCC-led Smart Design Innovation Network.
Together, HVM Catapult centres, academic thought leaders, and industry representatives from organisations like Airbus and BAE Systems identified challenges and acted as mentors throughout the competition.
This gave entrants rare access to those who work with engineering design processes every day – guiding decision making, validating ideas, and ultimately delivering better solutions.
Benefits beyond the competition
Businesses and technology providers collaborate every day to solve specific challenges. Those partnerships are valuable but are focused on the needs of a single organisation.
The approach taken in the Agentic AI Pioneers Prize goes one step further. By bringing together industry, researchers and AI innovators around shared challenges, it creates benefits that extend far beyond the organisations directly involved:
- Broad participation – Over 320 businesses took part in the Agentic AI Pioneers Prize across three categories, bringing a wide range of perspectives, expertise and ideas to the table.
- Shared learning – The competition didn't just create winning solutions. It created opportunities for industry, policymakers and researchers to learn from them, helping successful approaches reach a wider audience.
- Faster innovation – Without lengthy procurement processes or complex commercial agreements, participants could focus on solving the challenge itself. The competition surfaced high-quality solutions developed at a pace, which is difficult to achieve through traditional routes.
Solutions with genuine potential
The advanced manufacturing category of the Agentic AI Pioneers Prize was won by Abingdon-based SME Singular Machines.
Its Agentic AI model addressed one of the most significant challenges in modern engineering: data interoperability.
The platform demonstrated its potential by designing a six-axis industrial robot in under one minute, compared with a typical two-week design process. The robot went on to successfully manufacture test components without rework.
As a solution it’s targeted, timely and compelling.
Taking the next step: Validation
Competitions like the Agentic AI Pioneers Prize uncover promising ideas. The next step is proving them in an industrial setting.
That's where NCC and the High Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult's industrial testbeds come in, helping innovators test, validate and refine solutions alongside industry.
We have already demonstrated the value of this approach through the Digital Supply Chain Hub Defence Testbed Accelerator, delivered by Digital Catapult. Here, the challenge was to for SMEs to develop new ways for the Ministry of Defence and its partners to securely manage and share manufacturing design data.
Together, programmes like the Agentic AI Pioneers Prize and testbed accelerators form an innovation framework which is ready to move digital and AI solutions from promising concepts to trusted industrial tools.
Explainer: The Agentic AI opportunity
If successfully adopted, Agentic AI has the potential to radically change the way we design products, and overhaul the engineering processes used to deliver them.
In this new way of working, engineering teams would prescribe product goals and constraints, for AI agents to research, design, simulate and optimise solutions in real-time. Engineers set the vision and validate solutions, Agentic AI takes care of the 'doing'.
The potential efficiencies are obvious, but the opportunity is not just in productivity. For systems engineering, Agentic AI could create a living digital model for a product or enterprise: periodic reviews and change requests are replaced by constant, continuous optimisation.
Human oversight and expertise will be vital, but how does human ingenuity and machine agency combine in this new world?
NCC's Rapid and Accurate Concept Evaluation (RACE) approach has already demonstrated how engineering expertise, data and automated engineering workflows can dramatically accelerate concept evaluation.
The step we're exploring next is how Agentic AI integrates into frameworks such as these.