When low labor costs aren’t the primary driver of manufacturing advantage, the world might experience a dramatic economic shift – and AI could be the key, a key Alphabet executive tells CNBC.

Wendy Tan White is CEO of Intrinsic, a portfolio company of Google’s parent. In a Fortt Knox interview last week, she laid out the company’s vision for how artificial intelligence can help robots to adapt more quickly, do more complicated work and add value. 

The robotics play is part of a larger AI narrative driving markets and investment: In a November report, McKinsey estimated that “by 2030, about $2.9 trillion of economic value could be unlocked in the United States — if organizations prepare their people and redesign workflows, rather than individual tasks, around people, agents, and robots working together.”

Intrinsic launched five years ago out of Google X, the company’s research or “moonshot” division. Its mission: to make industrial robotics software smarter and more accessible. Tan White is the founding CEO, and has seen the unit’s efforts accelerate during the latest AI wave.

Through a joint venture with Chinese manufacturing giant Foxconn, Intrinsic hopes to build what it calls “the factory of the future,” infused with intelligent robotics, the companies announced in November.

“We’re not there to just sort of incrementally optimize what exists already,” she said. “Can we do things like produce a high mix of different products in one line or a set of cells, rather than the same sort of product?”

She also said the innovation will allow smaller businesses and countries with higher labor costs to build more.

“One of the things we’re looking at doing is really reshoring manufacturing,” she said. “It’s very expensive in some places, to manufacture. So the advantage of having almost software-as-a-service type of robotics solutions, gives you the ability to build them in different places.”