Agentic Terminals? Consider Production Line Takt Time First

Here’s some data: We recently did a retrofit on a welding line for an OEM. The requirement was to compress the cycle time per station from 60 seconds down to 45 seconds. But because a vision module added 0.3 seconds of inference latency, the entire line failed acceptance testing. The client made us redo it, costing us an extra three weeks to get it tuned properly. This makes me naturally allergic to slogans like "agents moving to the edge." It’s not that the tech is bad; it’s that the deployment costs simply haven’t been calculated clearly.