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.