On August 28, CanWay attended an industry exchange event organized by the Jiangsu Enterprise Information Association. The event brought together more than 30 enterprise IT executives in Nanjing. Nanjing Steel Group, which is a large-scale integrated iron and steel enterprise under CITIC Group. Participants toured it's smart factory, Future Pavilion and Smart Operations Center, exploring its intelligent production lines, digital transformation initiatives and enterprise-wide digital dispatch platform.
Wang Fan, Senior Solutions Architect at CanWay, outlined a path toward autonomous IT operations and shared the company’s work supporting Nanjing Steel Group’s integrated IT operations platform.
In speech, Wang Fan pointed out that manufacturing IT operations are facing multiple challenges: Reactive “firefighting” and repetitive tasks leave little time for proactive prevention. Disconnected IT and operational technology (OT) systems make faults difficult to pinpoint, while independently developed departmental systems create data silos and increase integration costs. And there is a huge shortage of professionals with expertise in both manufacturing processes and digital technologies. Traditional operations, which rely on manual expert analysis, can no longer support the high business continuity demands of smart factories.
In response, Wang Fan proposed a four-stage evolution path for manufacturing IT operations, moving from "operations efficiency assistance" to "AI autonomous operations": from intelligent efficiency tools that boost individual engineer productivity, to AI taking over routine operations, to agent-driven and multi-agent autonomous collaboration, and finally to an end-to-end, unattended autonomous operations loop. The core enabler of this leap is building "AI employees" — which are not roles, but executors of specific tasks: configured through a graphical, no-code interface to define goals, action plans, knowledge sets, and tool sets; users interact uniformly via natural language; and a single build can be reused across multiple scenarios, creating an infinitely scalable intelligent service system.
At the architectural level, CanWay builds its AI Employee system on the principle of a "lightweight foundation, scenario-driven" approach. The foundation layer relies on an integrated IT operations platform, consolidating full-stack operations capabilities such as configuration management (CMDB), full-stack observability, IT Service Management (ITSM), and automation, providing data support and an execution foundation for AI Agents. The middle layer combines a domain-specific LLM for IT operations with mainstream LLMs, enabling collaboration between large and small models to balance the precision of intelligent judgment with operational efficiency. The upper layer uses the CanWay AI Agent Studio to customize operations AI Agents on demand, deploying scenario-based agents such as automated inspection, fault analysis, digital humans for IT processes, and digital humans for standard operations, driving IT operations from assistance to autonomy.
Wang also shared insights from Nanjing Steel Group's integrated IT operations practice. Centered on the "one platform & six centers" construction goal, CanWay helped it build a platform-based, service-oriented, and data-driven integrated IT operations platform. It covers configuration, monitoring, log management, automation, operations, and alert management — centrally managing various IT objects to form a digital twin of IT operations objects. On this basis, through phased data-driven and intelligent development, scenarios such as intelligent ticketing, health profiling, and anomaly detection have been implemented, providing sustained support for the stable operation of the smart factory.
From "firefighting" operations to "AI Employee" on duty, the intelligent transformation of manufacturing IT operations is moving from concept to reality.
In the future, CanWay will continue to deepen its R&D and IT operations innovation capabilities centered on AI Agents. Leveraging the CanWay IT Operations products, we will help more manufacturing enterprises in Jiangsu and across China reduce costs and improve efficiency in IT operations, building a solid digital intelligence foundation for the high-quality development of smart manufacturing.
