The wave of intelligent transformation has ushered in a new era of development and change for Chinese manufacturing enterprises, attracting widespread social attention. This paper uses data from Chinese A-share listed manufacturing companies from 2013 to 2022, focusing on the perspective of organizational flexibility to explore the mechanisms through which intelligent transformation influences corporate profitability. The findings indicate that intelligent transformation significantly enhances corporate profitability by promoting production flexibility, resource flexibility, and organizational flexibility. These conclusions remain robust after endogenous analysis and robustness tests. Additionally, the study reveals that intelligent transformation has varying effects on the profitability of companies at different stages of their life cycle and with different levels of factor intensity. This research enriches the understanding of how intelligent transformation impacts corporate development and provides new evidence and insights for advancing intelligent manufacturing technologies and promoting intelligent manufacturing models.