MakinaRocks said it aims to build a fully autonomous manufacturing plant by developing AI that operates reliably in unpredictable factory environments, CEO Yoon Sung-ho told attendees at ATTENTION 2026 on Feb. 3 at the Westin Josun Seoul Parnas in Seoul’s Gangnam district. He said site-specific, field‑tuned AI and corporate control over data are essential to improving productivity.
“Real sites such as semiconductor plants never run on frontier AI models alone,” Yoon said. He warned that frontier AI models that do not know a company’s data or how work is done on the ground cannot overcome what he called a long-tail problem in industrial settings, leaving many complex, infrequent issues beyond AI’s reach.
Yoon cited a recent survey by a U.S. economic research institute that found 90% of companies reported no improvement in their income statements despite using AI for three years. He described the long-tail problem as one in which “more than 80% of issues are simple enough to handle easily, while the remaining 20% — less frequent but thorny and complex — remain beyond AI’s reach.” “In the end, frontier AI models that do not know the data or the way work is done on the ground cannot break through the 80% barrier, and corporate productivity does not improve either,” he added.
Corporate AI sovereignty is, for Yoon, a prerequisite to spreading site-specific AI. He said the term refers to a company’s capacity “to fully own its data, knowledge and know-how, and to internalize both the AI developed from them and the resulting output.” “Independence and control are also core elements of AI sovereignty,” he said, adding that each company must have the ability “to choose and change the technologies it uses at any time, so that it is not locked into a particular foundation model or infrastructure.”
MakinaRocks field-tuned Runway and FDE deployment
MakinaRocks is upgrading its AI operating system, Runway, to reflect that approach. The company sends forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) responsible for on-site implementation into each location, applies a company’s proprietary data and work processes to the AI, and accumulates the results as internal corporate assets.
Yoon said, “Our FDEs have visited more than 80 sites in 32 cities across five countries to date.” He added that they “put in roughly 70,000 hours in the field this year, and we have deployed more than 6,000 AI models at actual sites so far.” MakinaRocks said it plans to identify AI transformation projects across manufacturing, defense and other settings and to achieve a fully autonomous factory within three years.
He also said the company plans to build a fully autonomous factory and achieve hyper-productivity by 2028 in partnership with Enertork, an electric actuator maker.
