Oct 13, 2025 Interview at MHI Annual Meeting

Oct 16, 2025 Southeastern Louisiana University
Nov 4, 2025 Industrial Sage "Practitioners Unplugged"
Future of AI in Material Handling
Keynote at Business School at SLU. Video to be posted here following.
Video interview on Human-in-Command Architecture
"In a world racing toward AI everywhere, the collaboration between the context, experience, and judgment of humans and machine execution remains dangerously underdesigned."

Industry 4.0’s automation playbook for the Industry 5.0 era—where the human is in command, accountable for outcomes, and augmented by AI.
Craig A. Henry exposes the “forgotten middle” that limits performance as he lays out a practical architecture for intelligent interconnection across sensors, controls, people, and models. Signals have given way to networks, connecting intelligent field devices and sensors to edge and cloud-based control and data collectors.
Grounded in real operations, the book moves from wiring to wisdom: the Interface Layer that lets AI speak safely to machines; closed-loop digital twins that learn and act; AI as co-designer, co-integrator, and co-operator; and a Risk Layer that builds trust through explainability, governance, and zero-trust security.
At its core is the Human-in-Command Architecture (HiC-A)—policy-as-code, graduated autonomy, mission-control overrides, and a decision ledger that makes systems answerable.
Readers get a blueprint for both greenfield and brownfield plants: open standards and composable building blocks, device-level visibility, and metrics that go beyond OEE, time-to-intervene, override effectiveness, traceability, resilience, and MTTR.
Henry also introduces the Future-Ready Architect—the multidisciplinary leader who connects IT, OT, AI, cybersecurity, and the shop floor—and provides a 90-day execution plan to pilot safely and scale with confidence.
SUPER CONNECTED is the field guide for engineers, executives, and innovators ready to architect tomorrow’s industrial nervous systems—and to lead the shift from automation to accountable intelligence. The results are dramatic cuts in integration and maintenance labor, interoperable ecosystems, democratized component selection, lower total cost of ownership, faster reconfiguration, and systems that are not only smart—but explainable, governable, and resilient.
Tomorrow's industrial operation can achieve:
• Significant improvement in system integrity and interoperability
• Digital visibility of every field device
• Fulfillment of the promise of closed loop digital twins
• Remarkable reduction in labor to assemble, integrate & maintain
• Democratized component selection based on global industry standards
• Dramatic reduction in total cost of ownership
• Rapid configurability and re-configurability
• An intelligent and manageable cybersecurity architecture
Author CRAIG A. HENRY
ISBNs:
Chapter 1: The Forgotten Middle — Designing the Nervous System of Industry
Chapter 2: From Mechanized to Cognitive — The Shifting Brain of Industry
Chapter 3: Human in the Loop vs. Human on the Sideline
Chapter 4: The Interface Layer — Where AI Talks to the Physical World
Chapter 5: Closed Loop Digital Twins
Chapter 6: AI as Co-Designer, Co-Integrator, Co-Operator
Chapter 7: The Risk Layer — Trust, Explainability, and Security
Chapter 8: Democratizing Industrial Intelligence
Chapter 9: Greenfield + Brownfield + Grey Matter
Chapter 10: The Future-Ready Architect — Building with Super Connection
Chapter 11: Call to Action — Designing the New Nervous System
Chapter 12: From Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0 — Human in Command
Chapter 13: Swarm-Ready Field Devices — From Smart Nodes to Collective Intelligence
Chapter 14: The Relational Operating System — Humans, Machines, and the New Digital Intimacy
Chapter 15: The C-Suite — an Executive Mesh of Shared Command in a Super-Connected Enterprise
Chapter 16: The Glass Factory — Customer-Connected Operations at Scale
Chapter 17: The Industrial Sense of Touch — Designing Haptic-Aware Operations
Chapter 18: From Breath to Bit to Brain — A Short History of Connection
Chapter 19: The Open Stack — Standardization as a Profit Center


Our relationship with AI: is it a beautiful collaboration, or a dance with the Devil?
Perhaps it's both.
CONTACT email: craig@lifeselect.com Stay in touch!
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.