Smart manufacturing today has turned into one of the most important domains for industries with the enhancements of Artificial Intelligence and expert systems. The progress of the research in smart manufacturing enabled by AI has not had a scientometric analysis, which is still a research gap. Thus, the purpose of this work is to examine the development of research in AI and expert systems in smart manufacturing about opportunities and threats. The first aim is to investigate the trends as well as authorship pattern of this field, as well as the advances made in this field of study, through scientometric approach. To analyze the development status of this field and find out the hot spots and future development trends, we used bibliometric analysis in this paper besides the literatures review. The information for the study is derived from a survey of articles and their reference lists published in the last ten years. The study sample was obtained from several research databases with the major being Scopus from which major scientific publications in AI application, expert systems, and their incorporation into the manufacturing systems were identified. The paper discusses elements like publication frequency, citations, country distribution and keywords density. The analysis shows that AI increased its role in smart manufacturing by increasing the number of publications and their number of citations over time. The year 2021 is defined as the year with the maximum count of articles alongside the increased citations in the preceding year. The study shows a significant development on the trends of smart manufacturing with reference to AI and expert systems where there is much more potential for research in areas within the main theme of the study including AI in smart manufacturing process improvement and predictive maintenance. Although the advancements have been made the issues of AI implementation remain such as scalability and real-time applications. These insights can be valuable for both researchers and industry representatives when approaching the further advancement of smart manufacturing in the changing environment.