There are many who believe that China, with its burgeoning costs, is losing out in outsourced manufacturing to more nimble and cheaper competitors such as Vietnam and Thailand and there has been hope that with some concerted investments in the right areas, India too will finally find its place in the global manufacturing sun. However, the time for projecting India’s pool of engineering manpower and ability to do labour-intensive manufacturing at scale and quality is now over and the baton of leadership will pass to those who are truly able to design and build factories of the future, powered by cyber-physical concepts, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).