The digitization thrust on high value manufacturing and services opens-up new opportunities for ensuring; total system uptime, reliability, and e ciency particularly for mission-critical high value assets. The digitization process evolves intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS) which transforms maintenance into predictive reliability for achieving consistent quality throughout manufacturing process. This article unveils the intelligent grinding systems (IGS) for challenging grinding applications. For a more in-depth understanding and analysis of an entire intelligent grinding system, particular aspects within the system were discussed. These include Grinding Models, Process Design Algorithms, Process Monitoring, Process Control, Feature Extraction and Feature Correlation engines. The main focus, especially in the early 2000s, was mainly database development and parameter selection, which then shifted to process monitoring and control as particular technology advances were made. In the various goals that were investigated, it was evident that researchers were aiming for an online real-time system. This notion was driven by the advances in arti cial intelligence and improved monitoring sensors, for example, acoustic emission sensors and even other unusual sensors like microphones for more economical and improved data collection and analysis. Although tremendous strides have been made, a substantial amount of work is still required in achieving a fully-edged real-time intelligent grinding system. The comprehensive ndings on IGS system concludes that the real time process update has been improved from few hours to milliseconds.