Abstract: As emerging technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and collaborative robots have attracted increasing attentions in recent years, both in academia and in industry. Conventional automation approaches in manufacturing assembly have reached a bottleneck in terms of the level of automation, leaving the rest to manual work by human operators. To ease human tasks physically and intellectually, human-centric assembly is considered promising if facilitated by enhanced human abilities by augmented robots, cognitive systems, mixed reality and collaborative intelligence, together with the assistance of thought-driven brain robotics. For example, in human-robot collaborative assembly, robots are often required to dynamically change their pre-planned trajectories and control parameters to collaborate with humans in a shared workspace. Moving into the future, the relationship among AI, robots and humans is essential where human-centricity should be placed centrally in any AI-enabled human-robot systems, to ensure sustainability and resilience in future factories. In response to the need of better adaptability, human motion prediction for example is crucial for both collision avoidance and proactive assistance of robots to humans, in addition to multi-modal robot control and in-situ operator support. AI is proven to be useful for classification, recognition and context awareness identification. Within the context, this presentation first provides a snapshot of AI history, and then offers a futuristic perspective on the latest advancement and technical treatments of relevant technologies employed in human-centric assembly in smart factories. Remaining challenges and future research directions will also be briefly highlighted.