On a factory floor, the most expensive thing is not a machine — it is the knowledge locked inside the heads of the handful of engineers who truly understand that machine. When a line stops, when a motor hums wrong, when a new recruit faces a panel they have never seen before, the whole plant waits on that expertise. A young company from Mandi, a small town in Himachal Pradesh, is building an AI brain to put that expertise within reach of every engineer on the floor.
The company is Tecnod8.AI, founded in 2024 by Ravinder Kumar and Akshar Singh. Its product is an industrial AI copilot — what the company calls an agentic AI brain for industrial and automation engineering — built to assist engineering, maintenance and production teams so they can build fast, troubleshoot faster and produce more. It is the kind of tool that turns a frantic search through manuals, drawings and old service notes into a simple conversation.
Here is how the copilot works. A maintenance engineer facing a faulty machine can ask it what is wrong in plain language, and the system draws on a customised industrial language model, autonomous AI agents and three-dimensional simulations to explain the equipment, trace the likely fault and walk through the fix. A production team can pull up technical knowledge without hunting down the one senior colleague who remembers how a particular line was commissioned. The copilot also offers voice interaction and multilingual support, so help arrives in the language the engineer actually speaks on the shop floor.
One design choice matters a great deal for Indian industry: the copilot can be deployed locally inside the enterprise. The company says this lets factories keep control of their sensitive technical data rather than sending plant knowledge to outside servers. For companies whose process know-how is their competitive edge, that local deployment option turns AI assistance from a security question into a straightforward productivity decision.
The promise landed on a national stage in October 2026, when Tecnod8.AI was named one of eight winners of JSW MG Motor India’s MG Developer Program Season 6.0. Announced on 9 October 2026 under the theme “Innovation in Automotive”, the programme drew more than 130 entries; over 40 startups were shortlisted for presentation rounds and 18 reached the final jury. The eight winners now work with JSW MG Motor India and its ecosystem partners on pilot projects and real-world deployments. The programme, run with partners including DPIIT, Startup India, Jio, Gulf Oil India, TiE Delhi NCR, iCreate and TERI, has received more than 1,680 startup entries since it began in 2019.
JSW MG Motor India managing director Anurag Mehrotra said the Season 6.0 winners represent some of the most promising innovations across automotive technology, sustainability, industrial intelligence and mobility services — and that the programme exists to give startups a platform to collaborate, experiment and scale breakthrough ideas. For a two-year-old company from Mandi, that platform means its factory-floor copilot gets tested where it matters most: inside real automotive manufacturing.
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What makes the Tecnod8.AI story shine is where it comes from. Deep technology in India is often assumed to belong to the big metros, yet here is an agentic AI company built in a Himalayan town, taking on one of manufacturing’s oldest problems — that the knowledge to run a plant lives in too few heads. If its copilot does for the factory floor what the coding copilot did for software, every plant engineer in India gets a brilliant colleague on call, day and night, in their own language. That is a future worth building toward, and it is being built from Mandi.
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