COVID-19 and global crises/events are driving governments and businesses to rethink their manufacturing strategies. The drastic change of socio-economic conditions has exposed our reliance on a constrained, centralised set of production practices. Furthermore, the future manufacturing landscape indicates – supply chain crises, trade agreements and natural disasters, conflict – a high level of volatility which requires a response that is far from being achieved. While these emergent challenges have called the efficacy of established practices into question, Additive Manufacturing (AM), could present the capability to provide a solution. We work on a project proposing an agent-based brokering of AM which could be a distributed manufacturing system. This needs to be sensitive to the diversity of AM capability and the business models which are needed to support the model. In this talk we will present the ambitions, constraints and capabilities of this distributed system, based on our EPSRC-funded research at the University of Bristol in collaboration with several industry partners. It is about the AM sector as a potential distributed manufacturing solution, not a review of the project itself.