23 new industrial Lighthouses and Lumina push AI from pilots to factory scale

What happened

Around Davos 2026, the World Economic Forum welcomed 23 new industrial sites into its Global Lighthouse Network, taking the network to more than 220 sites across more than 30 countries. The new cohort was selected for demonstrated results in areas including productivity, supply-chain resilience, sustainability, customer centricity and talent.

Alongside the expansion, the Forum launched Lumina, an AI-powered industrial intelligence platform drawing on eight years of Lighthouse data and insights from more than 1,000 industrial transformations. The aim is to help industrial leaders benchmark performance, prioritize investments and move proven technology use cases from pilot stage into scaled operations.

Why it mattered

Davos discussions about AI often focus on models and policy. The Lighthouse announcement offered a different lens: measurable deployment inside factories and supply chains. The strongest examples combined AI with digital twins, machine learning, industrial IoT and workforce redesign rather than treating AI as a standalone tool.

The network also broadened the definition of industrial performance. Resilience, sustainability and talent now sit alongside traditional productivity measures, reflecting how manufacturing strategy is changing under geopolitical and cost pressure.

The Davos 2026 connection

The Lighthouse cohort and Lumina launch are treated here as one canonical industrial-transformation development because they were announced together and supported by the same Global Lighthouse Network research programme. The story maps primarily to AI & Technology and also to Companies & CEOs, Trade & Investment and Jobs, Skills & Society.

Image credit and rights

Hero image: industrial robot arm operating machinery in a factory, illustrating scaled industrial automation. Nenad Stojković / Shixart1985 via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0. It is illustrative and does not depict a specific Global Lighthouse Network site.

Related image

Smart-factory system architecture illustrating connected manufacturing. Wenshan Wang, Xiaoxiao Zhu, Liyu Wang, Qiang Qiu and Qixin Cao via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.