Rising customer demands for sustainable high-tech products, accelerated innovation cycles and multi-faceted crises create an increasingly dynamic and complex environment for industrial value creation. The Industry 5.0 vision to integrate sustainability, resilience and human-centricity into production organizations is a promising strategic response. However, while integrated management approaches such as Life Cycle Management (LCM) address complexity, the resulting cognitive load on the workforce is becoming a limiting factor for organizational viability. Technological advances in artificial intelligence (AI) offer new opportunities for the agentic augmentation of cognitive capabilities through enhanced cognitive assistance and automation. Therefore, this paper investigates, how a framework can support the integration of cognitive AI agents into LCM to advance the vision of Industry 5.0? We propose a novel framework synthesizing systems theory, LCM and cognitive AI. The framework utilizes the Viable System Model (VSM) as a formal blueprint, structuring the organizational functions across its recursively nested subsystems: policy, intelligence, control, audit, coordination and operation. Within this structure, cognitive AI agents are deployed as supporting resources to manage the complexity and cognitive load of implementing Total Life Cycle Management (TLCM). The framework further outlines how cognitive AI agents interact with digital technologies, human workers and organizational knowledge to enhance each VSM function. The result is a conceptual blueprint and taxonomy of agent types for designing AI-augmented organizations that are sustainable, resilient and human-centric.
Kuhr et al. (2026) studied this question.