Pioneering concepts of artificial intelligence (AI), edge-to-cloud (E2C) computing, blockchain, and visualisation need to be de-risked and applied to help next-generation industrial systems deliver unprecedented excellence in performance, explainability, trustworthiness and transparency. The EU-funded TALON project will combine the benefits of AI, edge and cloud networking, blockchain, and digital twins to develop an entirely automated AI architecture capable of bringing intelligence near the edge in a flexible, adaptable, explainable, energy and data efficient manner. TALON architecture includes an AI orchestrator to coordinate the network and service orchestrators and optimise the relationship between edge and cloud, a lightweight hierarchical blockchain scheme to preserve privacy and security, and new digital-twin-empowered transfer learning and visualisation methods.