Podcast: How 2024 transformed the manufacturing industry — Key trends and insights

2024 has been a year of remarkable growth and innovation for the manufacturing sector, with key trends making lasting impressions on the industry. Automation, AI, and advanced robotics have gained traction, while sustainability initiatives have become a central focus for many manufacturers. Additionally, global supply chain challenges and innovations in smart manufacturing have pushed companies to adapt and rethink their strategies. In this year’s end wrap-up, the editors from Endeavor Business Media’s Manufacturing Group look back at the most important trends that impacted manufacturing in 2024 and offer insights into the direction the industry is heading.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

TW: Hi everybody and welcome back to Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast. It’s our first podcast of the New Year, and to celebrate we've assembled the entire chief editing team from the Endeavor Business Media Manufacturing Group: Robert Schoenberger, Industry Week; Scott Achelpohl, Smart Industry; Laura Davis, New Equipment Digest; Dave Blanchard, EHS Today and Materials Handling & Logistics; and Robert Brooks, Foundry and American Machinist.

I’m Tom Wilk, the chief editor from Plant Services, and today we're going to take a brief look back at 2024. It’s been an eventful year in a lot of ways, so I'll turn to Robert Schoenberger first. As the chief editor of Industry Week, looking back on this past year, what was the biggest story or trend on your radar?

RS: It's not exactly a story so much as the vibe of the year that I think we just got through. It's a sense of waiting for something to happen. The entire year, the market seemed to be waiting for something to happen. It was, “we need to get inflation under control.” Once inflation seemed to start falling as well, “we need interest rate cuts” and then as well, “there's the election coming up.” There was a reason all year to delay any kind of spending, to delay investment in new operations and into new equipment.

It just felt like the entire year the details shifted, but the hesitancy, the fear of diving in and making big bets on the future were muted all year long. As these different issues got solved, as we got through the worst of the inflationary pressures, as we got past the first of the rate cuts, as we got into past the election, it still didn't lead to that, “well, fine, things are better now, let's go with it.” I felt a strong sense of hesitancy all year long, and I reflected on lots of interviews and conversations I had with various business leaders, there just didn't seem to be a reason to pull the trigger on spending and really double down on operations going forward.

There were a few individual examples, there was still a lot of manufacturing spending going on, but that was mainly in areas with significant federal support, the semiconductor sector and electric vehicle batteries and things like that, where there was a lot of government support and/or free cash available to do that. The rest of the manufacturing sector was pretty mired in the doldrums all year long.

TW: I'm curious Robert, you can tackle this and then anybody else who has thoughts on this chime in. Since the election, has anything dislodged to get movement going in this sector, or are people still giving it a month or two to figure out what's happening with the new administration?

RS: We can get into that a little more when we start going into the 2025 outlook, but I feel the same sense of hesitancy. Typically we go through this every four years. In the month or two, maybe even the three months before an election, there is a stalling of business activity as people wait to see who's going to be the next leader. It doesn't really matter who wins. It's getting that certainty of what to expect over the next four years out of Washington. I was expecting that logjam to really break after the election, but instead a new set of fears popped up. It moved from, “how are we going to handle the idea of taxes remaining high under a Biden-Harris administration?” to “How are we going to handle changes to tariffs and trade policy under Trump?” So I just get this very strong sense of hesitancy and fear in what's coming next that didn't get dislodged by the elections as it sometimes has in the past.

TW: We'll turn to Scott Achelpohl of Smart Industry. What are some of the things that you picked up from 2024?

SA: We did a lot of coverage of AI. Our coverage was dominated by AI and it was it was somewhat a factor of we still don't know what we can do with it, and I did notice over the year this gradual transition to “here are some use cases” and “here are more use cases.”

We've got our State Of Initiative report on the year coming up, which is going to be available for download in January. And the survey we put out to gather the data for that report was really kind of revealing, at least when it came to AI. We seem to notice a little bit of a pivot from hesitancy about AI to folks who were less likely to be what we would call laggards, people who weren't going to adopt the technology.

For example, in the new report, I'll give a little bit of a preview, twice as many respondents this year as last year counted themselves as power users, basically. And half of them said that they were going to be early adopters of AI and machine learning, which goes along in a lot of cases with AI. Last year, half hadn’t embraced AI and ML, but the “no” votes this year were down to 1/3. We might have even fewer laggards when we do the survey next year for 2025.

It's a lot of other stuff about AI. There was talk about the AI hype-to-disillusionment cycle that didn't seem to happen with AI. There was more warning about how it's definitely a technology that has specific use cases. We did a lot of reporting about the use cases. We've got another series of stories coming up that are called the Crystal Ball series of web predictions, and we're going to talk a lot in those pieces about AI, but there's going to be some talk also about cybersecurity.

Smart Industry is going to be doing a lot of reporting in 2025 on cybersecurity, and AI has a very big role to play in cybersecurity, as was identified by one of our authors, Chris Shields from cybersecurity company Geracell, and he's kind of predicting that AI will be powerful in threat hunting and detecting and responding to advanced cyber threats. Some of the other use cases for AI besides cybersecurity are going to be like predictive maintenance. PdM is getting increasingly sophisticated, and using AI to leverage automation and advanced functionality is also going to be increasingly sophisticated. Also, advanced functionality to help address the skills in the workforce shortages, which obviously we see in so many other sectors. All of us do with the concerns about having enough skills to run the technology, enough institutional knowledge to run the technology.

TW: You know, it is interesting to see how many AI use cases have been emerging. That's something I saw in the past year too for Plant Services. To keep it brief, our annual predictive maintenance mini-case study story all focused less on the mechanics of data collection, which it has in the past, and more this past year on using AI and machine learning to analyze the data that were being collected.

SA: Technology will hit a stone wall, it seems, and that's where you get into the disillusionment part. But AI doesn't seem to be getting there. People are really working out what it can do. And the excitement is really only building for it. Our thought leader Jeff Winter who we work with to do our Revolutionizing Manufacturing Program, he was all in with AI. He said basically any new technology brings uncertainty, but this one is different. We can already tell it will permeate every part of every function in every company, and he said that few technologies have that level of reach or impact. And I agree with him there, with AI it's just going to be this multi year build. If it reaches the disillusionment cycle, I would be surprised.

RS: Just one note on that. I did a webinar recently for 2025 outlook, where I talked to Philip Powell, who's a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. He mentioned that some of the reason why he's really excited about the future of the manufacturing sector is that productivity has rising very steadily for the past 18 to 24 months. And he credited AI to possibly driving part of that trend in technology in general, but AI specifically as driving that increase in productivity. This is one of those things that if we can continue to drive productivity in manufacturing plants, that has this beneficial cycle where you get more value out of every worker, which makes it easier to justify more investments and hiring more people. It can be a really good cycle. This happened a few times over the past few decades and it's usually a 2-3 year cycle that leads to very good things for the economy when it happens.

TW: Let's turn to Robert Brooks. Robert, one of the highlights of my year this past year was meeting you in person at the IMTS show and getting to hang out and talk a little bit. Maybe you can share some of the things that you've picked up over the past year.

RB: I may be echoing a little bit. I agree with Robert Schoenberger. The story for the two vertical markets that I cover – metal casting and manufacturing technology – the story there was just waiting for something to happen. The people in this in these sectors, they rely very much on the OEMs, the large manufacturers in automotive and defense and aerospace, energy, and general industry, and there just wasn't a whole lot of demand. It was flat best, and for months and months, most of the explanations came that it was they were waiting for the election, which always just seemed to me to be an excuse that they were throwing in because they didn't have any better grip on what was actually happening.

If you dig deeper into some of the trends, you can tell that there is consumer exhaustion. That explains the leveling off of automotive manufacturing, and the lack of clear direction from the auto industry about what they're going to do in their medium-term plans. There are other factors too. Inflation was a big problem for these manufacturers, energy costs were a big killer, labor costs were a big problem. It wasn't simply the cost of wages, but the cost of training and keeping workers. That's not a new development for metalcasters or for machine shops, or for anybody really. The cost of training and keeping a worker has been a very high concern in our surveys for the last four or five years.

So that that's the way I look at 2024. It's a lot of anxiety about disparate concerns. But there's also some very specific things. The problem in the Boeing supply chain that started the first week of the year, January 5th, when they had a when they had an incident aboard a 787-9, one of their two best selling aircraft models, and continues to have problems all through the supply chain. They just finally, after all these months, resumed manufacturing this week in Renton WA. So I hope that their manufacturing supply chain will straighten itself out, but again, that's an ongoing problem and it affects a lot of manufacturers along the way other than just Boeing.

RS: You add on to Boeing the strike this year, the very long strike and the tarnishing of the brand, and you have a major driver of U.S. economic activity that was on the sidelines pretty much all year.

TW: This is being recorded before Christmas, and one of the gifts I just bought my oldest (he's 13) is the COBI version of the Dreamliner 787, and he teases with me. He said, you can get that for me, but I'm not sure I'm going to put it together unless you pay me.

RB: Well, remember the Dreamliners in South Carolina, a right to work state? So yeah. I think you got the upper hand on the boy there.

TW: I'll let him know the bad news. Sorry, son. Let's turn to Laura, who's the chief editor of New Equipment Digest. Laura, one of the biggest trends here is hesitation to spend money. You're on the technology and equipment brand, so have you seen some excitement around certain equipment sectors? Other trends you've seen this past year?

LD: Yeah, and it's no surprise to anybody. The biggest trend I've seen is the rapid adoption of AI. As Scott said, it's been implemented or integrated into just about any new piece of equipment that has crossed my desk this year. Scott already mentioned a few of the use cases, but it has been used for design optimization, predictive maintenance, supply chain forecasting, quality control and inspection, smart factory management. That list just keeps growing, and I think a lot of us are burnt out a bit on the term and it's hard to discern where AI is actually improving operations when every piece of equipment now promotes its use.

The area I see it helping the most currently has got to be data analysis, particularly analyzing large data sets quickly. With machine learning you would get a bulk of data that would point you to problem patterns to investigate. Now with AI it just spits out those patterns for you and interprets and reasons everything at once, really changing the game, making it faster.

There's one more quick note. AI was not alone this year. Robots, especially cobots and humanoid robots, really took center stage in the industry. They are growing and I think they're going to continue to grow. They are becoming more collaborative, more flexible, more adaptive and now one robot can do more than one task, so the marketing around it is, “buy this robot, it won't just do this, you can move it around your facility to do X, Y, and Z also.” So it's great from a cost perspective – theoretically, you can purchase or rent fewer robots to do the same amount of work. And it's nice to see robots growing like that; it's been talked about for so long, they're not new in the industry, but the fact that they're still advancing is great.

TW: Robots were front and center at the IMTS show this year, too. I was surprised at how many larger companies are investing a stake in cobots.

RB: And the AI is influencing the programming for robots, so there's a kind of a circle going on there. It's fascinating for things like machine tending in smaller operations, something of a resolution to skills training, but still it's a big development for a lot of shops that up until this point have not have not found any use cases for automation that way.

TW: Well, let's go to Dave Blanchard. Dave, you work on the two titles that are safety focused and supply chain focused. What are some of the things that you picked up on this past year, and has AI penetrated the safety sector?

DB: Well, that's a great question. You know, Tom, there’s a lot of same old, same old in workplace safety. People still getting hurt by falling or from vehicle accidents, or just a slip strips and falls that we hear about all the time. Mental health concerns are still very prominent in the workplace, more anxiety and depression and stress. We hear a lot about it at the end of the year, when people are just kind of exhausted, but burnout doesn't seem to have gotten any less prominent, it seems to always be in play.

A lot of companies still emphasize productivity over safety. So I mean your first question, can AI fix any of that? I Doubt it. I don't know that there's any AI program that's going to improve all the situations in that regard. I don't want to get too philosophical about how can AI improve the quality of life. It can improve the quality of the work life a little bit, and I'll talk about that a little bit more as we get into it. The good news is, there are some programs and these aren't brand new programs necessarily, but there's an emphasis on a lot of companies on total worker health. In similar workplace programs, they don't just look at, “we want to make sure that everybody wears their safety gear, and if you do, we'll check off that box.” They're looking at safety and total worker health as something that's always happening.

It even goes outside of the work day experience where they want to encourage people to eat healthier, exercise, take care of yourself, take care of your mental and your psychological health. I see that happening at companies who are actually dedicated to not just save money on workers comp costs (there's nothing wrong with doing that, in fact, that's a great motivation to anybody managing a company who wants to have worker comp costs as low as possible). But it's also just a healthy recognition that these workers are your main asset, your most expensive cost. Taking care of your employees and making sure that they're taking care of themselves and taking ownership for their own safety and for workplace safety, I think that's a great trend.

And then totally switching gears on you, the other industry I cover is material handling and logistics. You look at warehousing and transportation and for that industry, I can talk a little bit more about technology. 2024 looked like it was going to be a really promising start because there's a lot of excitement about the announcements of new or improved warehousing automation technologies we’ve already talked about today – AI, robotics, things like that.

The other thing we talked a lot about today were labor issues. You look back at 2024, what do we see? We saw strikes, we saw labor issues on the railroads and at the ports and in companies and within industry sectors. And we've been talking for years and years about how hard it is to get workers, especially for warehouse workers. A lot of these people, they’re employees who are immigrants, and there's been a big backlash from some political sectors about, “let’s tighten the borders, make it harder to get people across the border and become hired by U.S. companies.” A lot of companies are not sure what's going to happen when the borders are tightened and it becomes tough for immigrants to join the U.S. workforce because they already are having a very difficult time finding those kind of workers. So can AI and automation really solve those kinds of labor shortages? There's a huge challenge and I don't know what the answer to that is.

TW: Let me throw one bonus question out. Since we're recording this before the holidays, we had a fun discussion offline about this, so open question, anybody wants to take it first: is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

DB: No!

SA: Having watched it within the last week, I will say that it is a Christmas movie. Hans Gruber shoots up a Christmas party to start the movie. And then come on now: “I have a machine gun, ho ho, ho”? I saw a Christmas sweater on the TikTok shop that said that, so it most especially is a Christmas movie.

RB: Your honor, if I may, it's not a Christmas movie. It's a movie that has a plot that encounters Christmas activities. If it's a movie that you and your loved ones watch because you're gathered together around Christmas, I think that's great. But this is not a movie about Christmas.

On the other hand, there are lots of good movies that are not about Christmas that encounter Christmas, so it's in good company there. I offer three examples:

1934, The Thin Man, based on a Dashiel Hammett novel, involves high society types encountering street lowlifes. Lots of funny repartee between husband and wife characters, who are largely drunk throughout the movie. Very much worth your time.
1947, Lady in the Lake, based on a Raymond Chandler novel. One of the first movies to use a forced perspective on the audience. It’s a little bit hard to follow, but you know, that's what you get with Raymond Chandler. Very much worth your time.
1960, The Apartment, with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. The #metoo movement had nothing on the activities going on at this insurance company in 1960, directed by Billy Wilder. One of the truly great American movies of the 20th century, everyone should see it, whether it's Christmas or not.

SA: I have some honorable mentions that are post-1980. Trading Places, that’s a Christmas movie! Drunk and distraught Dan Aykroyd, dressed to Santa with a salmon stuffed out his jacket. I mean, how could you get more Christmas than that really? And Sleepless in Seattle, you could argue that one's maybe a Christmas movie, although that one extends into Valentine's Day and it's just an agonizing chick flick. Anyway, and my wife nominated The Nightmare Before Christmas, which is sick Halloween themed fun about the kidnapping and torture of Santa. I mean, come on, who could not deny that?

RS: So here's where you're all wrong. Die Hard is not just a Christmas movie. It is a Hallmark Christmas movie, you’re just looking at it from the wrong perspective. Holly McClain learns that for high power corporate job is not satisfying her and that she needs to settle down with a man from her hometown, just like every single hallmark movie out there. She had all these other suitors available to her, but no, she settled down with the man from her past to go and enjoy Christmas, and they drove off in the cab to those wonderful Christmas carols to start their new life together. They might as well have been in a farm in Vermont.

TW: She even moves back to New York at the end for him, it sets up the sequel. I'm going to throw a bonus Christmas movie out there: Night Of The Comet. One of my side passions is science fiction, both good sci-fi movies and bad sci-fi movies, and this was from the mid-’80s. There's nothing like a comet signaling massive change on the earth, just like the Christmas story. And in that one the comet turns most people into zombies.

RB: That happened in War And Peace too.

TW: Not the zombie part, but the comet part, right?

RB: Yeah, right. Right.

SA: If we want Christmas movies to be categorized as ones where you can use to escape from annoying relatives, I would dominate the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. The extended editions especially – a good 12 hours.

TW: Laura, we haven't heard from you yet. Die Hard – Christmas movie, yes or no?

LD: Never seen it, so I can't comment. I know about it but I've never sat down and watched it.

DB: That's the best answer of all. I like that. Die Hard is not a Christmas movie. It has Christmas in it, but it's not a Christmas movie. A Christmas Carol with Scrooge and Miracle on 34th St. are Christmas movies.

LD: A Muppet Christmas Carol is one of the best Christmas movies.

DB: Yeah, I mean, Harry Potter movies, they all have Christmas in then because they're about the entire school year, so Christmas is part of the plot. But you don't say oh crap, that was a great Christmas movie. No, it's great, it just had a little bit of Christmas in it. So you have to stick with Scrooge and you have to stick with Kris Kringle.

TW: Well, I have to say on this question, I side with Scott and Robert S., but man, all I want to do now is see Die Hard on the Hallmark Channel side by side with all the rest.

SA: If you want a holiday feeling, even though it's technically a Thanksgiving movie, I would also nominate Planes, Trains And Automobiles with the brilliant John Candy and Steve Martin.

TW: Well, one of the last things on my list this year in Chicago before Christmas is to go to the annual double feature of It's A Wonderful Life and White Christmas. I only mention that since those two movies didn't come up. For anyone listening to this after the holidays, I hope you had a good holidays and saw whatever Christmas movies you wanted. Thanks for the whole manufacturing chief editor team for being with us today! everyone have a great 2025 and we'll see you for our next episode real soon. Take care now.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.