Podcast: What’s next for manufacturing? Key tech and trends to watch in 2025

2024 was been a year of remarkable growth and innovation for the manufacturing sector, with global supply chain challenges and innovations in smart manufacturing pushing companies to adapt and rethink their strategies. But what's in store for 2025? In this podcast, the editors from Endeavor Business Media’s Manufacturing Group look forward at the trends they will be keeping their eyes on in the new year.

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 look ahead at what we're all expecting in 2025. From the Plant Services side, I look back at 2024 and I think the number one trend that I picked up on was that the next generation of leadership is in place, and it's Millennial leadership. That's an interesting fact in and of itself, but also this new generation is hungry for professionalization. They're aware of a lot of maintenance best practices, asset management best practices, but a lot of questions that I heard throughout the year centered on, “how do we get ourselves more trained up? How do we move from reactive modes to proactive maintenance modes?” And that centers on the ongoing challenge to hire good people. I think the race to do more with less is firmly in place and we're going to see more automation in the maintenance side and the data collection ana analysis especially.

I'll pivot to the next part of our conversation, which is what are we looking forward to in 2025? I think the largest thing that I'm seeing or I'll keep be keeping an eye on is the extent to which AI can help maintenance teams automate onerous manual processes, like Root Cause Analysis, and like Failure Modes and Effects Analysis. To do an RCA exercise on a single asset can be a very onerous task that takes an awful lot of team resources. I'm now seeing software modules that can help automate that process, pulling in ChatGPT for example, to digest unstructured data like machine manuals and old maintenance reports, to help maintenance teams get a handle on these very onerous work processes and maybe get them done quicker. If you can only do 4 to 6 in a year, maybe you can do 12 to 14 in a year. Or if you can't do any of them, if you're not staffed up enough to do it, maybe AI can help you do a couple of those and get you in a more proactive maintenance mode.

So again, for Plant Services, there's a lot to look forward to, but the integration of semantic AI to get some of that more onerous manual work and analysis work done is something I’ll be keeping an eye on. Robert Brooks, what's one thing that you're looking forward to in 2025?

RB: Well, I think the capital investment bubble is going to blow. I think there's pent up demand by manufacturers to invest in new equipment – not necessarily new technology, but certainly new equipment. In the metal castings sector, also some new plant construction. It's overdue in that sector but they have been sitting on their need, their desire to invest all through the current year because they don't want to be the first one to jump in the pool, or are waiting for some development to happen.

In September, at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS), new orders for equipment were more than double the average of the previous and the subsequent month. There was no outlying factor driving that, and I attributed it to the desire to spend, the desire to have new equipment in the house. It’s like people buying a new TV because they think they deserve it, or they're getting a new car because their lease ran up. It's just a desire to do that sort of a thing and I think they've been holding back, waiting for consumer demand to tell them to do this. I think at some point in 2025, consumer demand will tell them to do it and they will do it. That's what I'm looking for.

TW: Robert S., is that something you'll aso be keeping your eye on?

RS: Yeah, certainly, I think Robert Brooks did it really nicely here. The consumer has been telling manufacturers for quite a while now that they'll buy what's available. The American consumer has kept our economy afloat very nicely over the past two years. As much as people complain about grocery store prices, they spend; they go out and buy new clothes and they go out and buy other new things.

There are some bottlenecks in the economy. Probably the biggest one is the housing market, which has been depressed for so long and once that kicks back into gear again, that leads this great virtuous cycle as more housing is being built, that requires more pickups for the contractors to move things around, which leads to auto sales, which leads to furniture sales, which leads to appliance sales as people move into those new houses and want a new dishwasher and a new washing machine, all these things.

That market's been depressed for so long, regardless of who won the election, Harris and Trump both had a lot of policies in place that they plan to enact in the new year to spur more housing construction because we know that's a challenge throughout the U.S. economy. Housing affordability has gotten very poor for young people, and anything that will move the needle on that will spark so much economic activity in the ancillary markets around it, so I'm really looking forward to seeing that.

The question has been for so long, as inflation went up and as rates went up, could we achieve this soft landing. It's pretty clear that we did not drive the economy into a ditch with the rapid increase in interest rates. They did their job, which was painful. It slowed economic activity, it discouraged investment in big new capital equipment, all the things that were talking about being down. But they did their job also in reining in inflation for the most. So if we can clear some of these big bottlenecks in housing and energy and to some degree in food costs (although we're not going to get any help in the poultry market when you've got this avian flu going around, there's always going to be something in the economy that will throw a wrench into things), the underlying conditions for a very strong economy for the next several years are in place. They had been kind of falling into place for the past 18 months or so, and it really looks like there's a great ramp for a strong year if we can get past a few hurdles.

TW: Scott, what's something that you're going to keep your eye on for 2025?

SA: I don't mean to belabor AI, but … AI! One interesting thing I want to see is, and I'm less of a veteran in the manufacturing industry than you all are, but AI seems to have spurred what I would kind of call a cottage industry in software developers and vendors developing ways for manufacturers to examine the health of their data. We talked a lot this year about “oh, AI implementation is so critical, and it's so critical to have clean data,” and what I noticed, especially in our visits to conferences, the one we visited, Tom, and another couple I went to earlier in the year is there's so much emphasis on “there's only so much you can do with AI if you don't have the data to operate it cleanly” and I just think in 2025 there's going to be an emphasis on making sure that you have data health, if you're going to implement AI.

TW: Yeah, the conference that you and I were at was the IFS Unleashed conference, and I was struck by how all-in IDS is on AI and AI applications. They said they have a team of 2,000 people working on AI challenges every day, something like 200 different potential use cases and they’ve already implemented 60 of them, put them into production. So it’s astonishing, and that's just one company.

SA: It'll be interesting to see.

TW: Laura, we'll pivot to you. What are some trends and stories you're going to keep your eye on for this coming year?

LD: I’m still going to keep my eye on robots, especially humanoid robots. This past year we saw probably the most robots that have been released in a year, at least in my career, and being in manufacturing. I think that's going to continue to grow next year, especially for warehouse applications, I think those will be big.

A second prediction I have and it might not happen this next year, but I foresee AI being integrated with safety tech and wearables. There's already a lot of safety wearables on the market. Communication devices that track workers, they help handle emergency situations, some help workers avoid risky positions, so they don't injure themselves. And there’s not a ton, but there's enough out there, but I think they'll start integrating with AI and it'll improve risk, association, risk prevention, to protect workers even more than they do now, and not necessarily just wearables, but safety components and mechanisms that are on machinery. If AI is integrated into those, it'll be a way to track safety issues and incidents, and help prevent them in the first place. I think we'll start seeing that, I don't know how big it will be, but I think it'll be a thing that happens.

TW: That's a good transition over to you, Dave, and EH&S especially. What are one or two things you're going to be watching for 2025?

DB: Thanks Tom, I had the opportunity recently to moderate a panel discussion at the Global Manufacturing and Industrialization Summit, which was held in Abu Dhabi of all places. The summit actually focused on industrial safety, and there's a new global initiative coming out called the Manifesto for Global Industrial Safety. The main goal of that manifesto is to advocate the adoption of technology to make workplaces safer, and they're particularly looking at developing nations, so not just the United States and Europe, they're looking at worldwide, and they want to adopt things like AI

We've been talking about AI all over the place today, and but even in more places, AI and Internet of Things sensors and data analytics and drones. We hear all these technologies talked about but they’re really trying to push this thing forward. The theme there at that show, which kind of mirrors what I heard in a lot of the shows in the U.S. on workplace safety, it’s that adopting safety technology should no longer should be a nice-to-have, but it's a need-to-have, no matter where you are, no matter what size of company, or where your company is located in what part of the world.

It kind of echoed another safety initiative I've kind of been keeping my eyes on, called the Global Strategy on Occupational Safety and Health. They're trying to promote the adoption of safety management systems, kind of a technology focused effort, just make it easier and more efficient. You've got all the safety information, what are you going to do with it? How are you going to manage it? For safety managers, their job should not be just sitting down on a computer all day, just typing away. The job should be making sure that their workers are kept safe and they're trying to come up with technologies that make it easier, more efficient, and save you time so you're not just typing away instead of managing and observing your workers. Also OSHA is very gung ho on the adoption of safety management systems. So anyway, my point is I don't know that technology is going to be the be-all and end-all for workplace safety, but it's certainly going to be a dominant theme in 2025.

And to segue over to the supply chain side, which I cover with Material Handling and Logistics, we talk about AI and warehouse robots and sophisticated planning tools, and we’re going to hear a lot more about that. I think I think 2025 is going to be the year where there's no reason to hold it back anymore. A lot of companies were sitting on their hands, you know, waiting to see what happened with the elections, which is always just kind of an excuse to not spend any money, because no matter what happens with the elections, people still need to buy stuff. We've heard about the promises of technology for supply chains for a long time, but in 2025, I think some of the technology started catching up with what people need to be able to do so.

The Holy Grail for supply chain is total end to end supply chain visibility. So if companies can get better at predicting product demand, they can get better at moving their products to the warehouse faster, onto the loading dock more efficiently, onto a truck and off to the end user on time at the exact right time. Companies can do that now. That's what they need to do, that’s what they want to do, that's how they will achieve that total supply chain visibility and AI will be a tool to help them get there. Automation is a tool to help them move products faster. At the end of the day, you have to be able to trust the data though, so if you if you don't have good communications throughout your supply chain, you need to get better at that.

And I think that's where companies are going to get focused on, is being smarter about not assuming that they know what they already know, but believing the data and believing in the efficiency of your workers. You have to have good workers, no matter how great the AI is, no matter how great the robots are, you still have to have good people at your company and I think that's where we're going to see a lot of movement in 2025.

TW: For anyone listening to this after the holidays, I hope you had a good holidays and saw whatever Christmas movies you wanted. Thanks to the whole manufacturing chief editor team for being with us today, and everyone have a great 2025 and we'll see you for our next episode real soon.

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.