Factory reality
Machines, operators, production systems, quality records, suppliers and local documents produce the facts of the floor.
Quorum Substrate
Governed industrial memory. Controlled agent authority.
Substrate gives industrial agents the foundation they need to work safely: evidence, provenance, time-effective operational context and explicit authority boundaries across the systems your plant already runs.
FIGURE 1 - THE OPERATING LAYER
04
Industrial agents
Containment, reconciliation, quality evidence, audit and maintenance agents work from the same governed memory.
03
Agent governance
Identity, permissions, confirmation, audit and declared authority boundaries determine what each agent may do.
02
Quorum Substrate
Plant activity becomes governed evidence with source, provenance, time-effective context and operational meaning.
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Existing factory reality
Machines, operators, PLCs, MES, QMS, ERP, suppliers, local systems and documents remain in place.
Substrate sits beneath and across the plant - preserving what agents must know and governing what they may do.
The Architecture
Four layers. One governed operating context.
Substrate connects plant reality to agent action without asking a manufacturer to abandon the tools, records and workflows already in place.
Governed memory
Substrate preserves source, provenance and the operational context that applied when each fact occurred.
Agent control
Identity, permissions, confirmation and audit make authority explicit before any recommendation becomes action.
Industrial agents
First-party agents investigate defined jobs, explain their answers with citations and stop at their declared boundary.
What Substrate Captures
Evidence at the boundary. Records from the systems.
Substrate combines source-level evidence from the machine and operator boundary with records from existing systems. The result preserves where a fact came from and the context that applied at the time - information that cannot be reliably reconstructed later.
FIGURE 2 - A GOVERNED EVIDENCE RECORD
MACHINE
Measured production event
source citedOPERATOR
Observation at the work boundary
identity retainedSYSTEM
Record from an existing plant system
origin retainedGAP
Evidence expected but not present
made visibleConceptual figure. The public site describes the evidence contract, not its implementation.
FIGURE 3 - CONVERSATIONAL SURFACE
PLANT LEAD
Why did the inspection hold expand after shift change?
ANSWER · CITED
The hold expanded when two late inspection records entered the governed evidence set [E-221]. One unit group remains unresolved because its operator confirmation is missing [G-18].
Recommendation available · confirmation required before action
The Conversational Surface
Ask the floor. Get an answer you can defend.
Humans ask operational questions in natural language, typed or spoken. Agents respond with narrative answers that cite governed evidence, expose uncertainty and respect the authority boundary.
Situations and Reconciliation
Make the disagreement part of the record.
When expected evidence is absent or records disagree, Substrate makes the gap an explicit operational situation. Agents investigate from the available evidence, cite what supports the answer and surface what remains unresolved.
Detect
A gap, divergence or risk becomes a named situation instead of disappearing inside a report.
Investigate
An agent gathers the relevant evidence and preserves its sources and operational context.
Explain
The answer distinguishes supported facts, conflicts, missing evidence and proposed next steps.
Agent Governance
Authority is declared. Every action is accountable.
Each agent has an identity, a permission set and a defined authority rung. It may observe, explain or recommend only within that boundary; confirmation and audit remain part of the operating record.
I
Identity - which agent is acting and on whose behalf.
II
Permissions - which evidence and workflows it may access.
III
Confirmation - where an accountable human must approve.
IV
Audit - what the agent proposed, who confirmed and what happened next.
Deployment
Your systems stay. Your data stays. Substrate works beneath and across them.
Substrate is deployed in your plant, on your infrastructure - the evidence and operational memory it builds belong to you. Adopt an agent on a defined workflow without pausing production; each deployment adds governed evidence and operating context while your existing systems remain in place.
See Substrate through the first agent we deploy together.
Start with a containment investigation grounded in cited evidence and explicit human approval.