This work reviews and recaps some lessons learnt in the industrial cyber-physical systems playground to indicate a viable path towards an effective use of artificial intelligence in distributed automation. The holon concept is used as a pivotal tool towards a simplification of the design and implementation of architectures that exploit recursive patterns and self-similarities to keep the industrial systems-of-systems problem under control, whilst addressing the consistent coupling between the physical environmental and the reasoning processes. The Beer’s viable system model is used as an inspiration towards new viable holistic visions of the production system-of-systems.