Podcast: Key trends in manufacturing technology — Predictions and insights from industry experts
Smart Industry recently released its annual Crystal Ball Report, a collection of expert forecasts for the upcoming year. Despite the mystical-sounding title, the report is based on smart analysis and expert opinions about the future of manufacturing technology. Scott Achelpohl, managing editor at Smart Industry, curated and crafted the content for this special section, focusing on key topics like cybersecurity, AI, automation, and other technologies expected to make waves in the year ahead. In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Scott shares a preview of this year’s report and his predictions for 2025.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast:
Today, I wanted to take a few minutes to tout our best work of the new year so far, Smart Industry’s Crystal Ball series, which ran on our site from mid-December all the way until mid-January. So, as January concludes, I wanted to go over some of the highlights of the series.
As you might imagine, AI was a huge talking point among our crystal ball thought leaders, starting with Aaron Merkin and Jason Waxman’s piece on December 16th, where they argued that AI this year could begin to make all the difference in capturing and utilizing knowledge that is being lost as manufacturing sheds more of its skilled workforce through retirements and attrition.
Crystal Ball 2025: The opportunity for AI-powered digital transformation
Institutional knowledge along with a retiring skilled workforce is being lost, leaving behind a major experience gap. With AI, however, organizations can capture that knowledge in an information storehouse.
In the series, we heard a lot about how AI will impact cybersecurity, and Chris Scheels of Geracell predicted that organizations will increasingly turn to AI to power their improved security procedures. He said that as AI models continue to evolve, they will be able to identify sophisticated attacks that traditional methods of detection might miss.
Crystal Ball 2025: Insights on AI, automation, and insider threat detection
The new year promises a wave of interconnected industrial technologies that increase manufacturing’s efficiency and, importantly, its security posture.
More generally, David Parry Jones of DeepL wrote that increased awareness of AI in the public consciousness has been a huge accelerant for enterprise adoption. Smart Industry is going to focus a lot this year, not on why AI is this shiny new thing, but on what AI can do specifically for your manufacturing operations.
Crystal Ball 2025: More experts predict manufacturing tech trends (Part 1)
AI’s maturation is high on their lists. But so is automation, robotics, data health and governance, multi-cloud infrastructure, and sophisticated cybersecurity.
Just after the Crystal Ball series concluded, Raj Badarinath of Rootstock Software wrote for us about Rootstock’s State of AI in Manufacturing Survey and how it showed that, yes, 90% of manufacturers say AI is important to the future of industry and that 77% have implemented some form of AI. But more interestingly, they said apprehension might be leading them to lean toward AI copilots supervised by humans over autonomous agents that operate without human oversight. That tells us there's tons of enthusiasm about AI, that this tech is here to stay, but that trust is still low or at least on the lower end. According to that same survey, only 22% of those surveyed by Rootstock and vendor research states say they opted for agents as opposed to 53% of adopters who prefer copilots.
New survey says manufacturers prefer AI copilots over autonomous agents
Enthusiasm for AI and its penetration into the marketplace is no longer surprising at this point. What is? The preference for tools designed to assist human work, not those that operate independently without human oversight.
I mentioned cybersecurity earlier. In addition to AI, we’ll focus a lot this year on systems and plant floor software security. Aron Brand of CTERA Networks described for us how resilient manufacturing will rise in 2025 because, as IT and OT continue to converge, opportunity and risk will come to the industrial landscape. And manufacturers must evolve their cybersecurity strategies because adversaries continue to make their methods more sophisticated.
Crystal Ball 2025: The rise of resilient manufacturing
Convergence of IT and OT will bring both opportunity and significant risk to the industrial landscape. To thrive, manufacturers must evolve their cybersecurity strategies just as rapidly as adversaries are evolving their methods of attack.
Cybersecurity compliance, meaning following government rules and standards and reporting requirements like those imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S., also is an important consideration and will be a whole-company challenge, not just one for the IT team, Joe Anderson of TechSolve wrote for us as part of the Crystal Ball series. Our Great Question podcast hosted Joe in October to chat about the importance of vigorous password policies and practices. Joe possesses numerous cybersecurity certifications such as CISSP, PNPT, CompTIA Security+, C|EH, ECSA, CMMC-RP, and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer: Security. Joe is an important voice for us, and he had a siren call in this Crystal Ball series that cybersecurity has to be a company-wide focus in order for it to succeed.
Crystal Ball 2025: Now’s the time to strengthen your company’s cybersecurity compliance
CMMC for defense contractors, TISAX for automotive suppliers, and other rules and standards make the new year all about reinforcing network defenses among IT and OT personnel.
Patrick Spencer of Kiteworks looked into trends that will reshape private content security. And that the focus in the New Year will be building what Patrick calls adaptive security architectures. Does this include using AI? He says absolutely, because AI is bound to be used by adversaries, the threat actors that will wield sophisticated AI-powered attacks.
Crystal Ball 2025: Trends that will reshape private content security
Success this coming year and beyond lies in building adaptive security architectures that can evolve to meet emerging threats while maintaining strict compliance with global regulations.
Read the complete Smart Industry Crystal Ball Report
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.