Toward industry 6.0: the ecosystem age, superintelligence, viability, and OR-AI symbiosis

Operations and supply chains have witnessed spectacular transformations through Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0. Is the next industrial revolution – Industry 6.0 – unfolding in the context of artificial intelligence (AI) and human-AI collaboration? And, possibly, even Industry 7.0 and superintelligence (SI) are just around the corner? In this paper, we conceptualize the transition toward Industry 6.0 as the Ecosystem Age that builds upon technologies developed in Industry 4.0 and viability-centric socio-ecological principles proposed in Industry 5.0, emerging into a cyber-socio-technical-ecological industrial revolution. We create a taxonomy of industrial revolutions based on the types of work that have been replaced/transformed by machines over time, and utilize it to delineate Industry 6.0 and forecast Industry 7.0 framed in technology (e.g., generative AI, agentic AI, edge AI, and humanoid robots), organization (i.e., decentralized, autonomous, agentic-driven planning and control), and modelling (OR-AI symbiosis) dimensions. Second, we discuss potential impacts of the transition toward Industry 6.0 on Operations Research (OR) with associated challenges and chances, outlining a 7-layer architecture of OR-AI symbiosis in digital twins. We elaborate on the technology and viability principles that frame Industry 6.0 and discuss scenarios for further transitioning toward next industrial revolutions and cyber-virtual, AI-driven networks that learn, adapt, self-organize, and regenerate. We conclude by outlining research opportunities for OR in the new era of supply chain and operations management in the AI and superintelligence age.