Over two days of presentations and panel discussions at Ultrasound World 2026, one message from reliability leaders was a constant like the waves crashing on the beach outside in Clearwater, Florida. Predictive maintenance succeeds because of people—not technology.

“Programs don't scale; habits do. You have to make [reliability] part of your day-to-day, and make it part of your culture.” That observation from Jeremy Bey, strategic accounts leader at UE Systems, captures a challenge facing many manufacturers and reliability programs today. Plants are investing in ultrasound, vibration monitoring, artificial intelligence, remote monitoring, and advanced analytics, but the technology itself is rarely the reason reliability programs succeed or fail.

Across presentations from reliability leaders at Michelin, Amazon, FedEx, UE Systems and others, the biggest barrier to predictive maintenance is not access to better tools. (Of course, those industry leaders have the best technology and tools.) The challenge is creating the organizational behaviors and culture that allow those tools to deliver value.

There was plenty of room for discussion about technology at the conference, and it had its time in the spotlight, but speakers spent far more time discussing leadership, training, standardization, and accountability. As Chris Hileman, reliability engineering manager at Amazon, summarized, “At any scale, reliability success is built on cultural consistency, disciplined execution, cross-functional accountability. While technology will amplify what you're doing, it cannot fix it.”

Technology is the easy part. Changing behavior is more nuanced.

Without changing the way people work, new investments in technology often fail to create lasting improvement. Eric Holt, technical training instructor at Michelin, described this challenge after implementing predictive technologies across the organization. Holt also wasn't alone in framing culture as the difficult part of technology implementation. Throughout the conference, many speakers described technology deployment as relatively straightforward compared to sustaining long-term behavioral change.

“My project seems to be a never-ending one,” Holt said. “The project was: How do we implement predictive tools in Michelin? How do we keep track of this? How do we continue using predictive tools, not just let it get packed up in a closet and collecting dust again.” This project has been ongoing for a decade, after Holt attended his first Ultrasound World.

Deploying the technology was easy. The real project was ensuring people continued using it. “Return on investment for me was, we want to get that culture change,” Holt said. But it was a long process for Michelin, as he explained. How do you track culture change? Holt tracked the success of predictive tools by tracking energy savings, starting with monitoring compressed air leaks, an easy target.

Michelin tailored its CMMS to track how technicians were finding and fixing air leaks. And before implementing any new testing on the floor, every process and practice was documented, and routes were set up. After implementation, it was clear which shops were using the new technology and which ones were not. Documentation was just the start, and the culture change required lots of in person training.

Reliability must become how work gets done

The strongest reliability programs are part of normal operations, not separate initiatives. In working with FedEx and maintenance engineer Stephen Ford, who took over the program in 2023, Bey of UE Systems described this transition as moving reliability from a program into a habit. At first, workers were worried the program was “a flavor of the month” or tied to a new executive promotion. “Instead of becoming a hindrance and ‘we have to do this because they’re telling us to do it.’ It just became, ‘This is how we do it. This is part of our process’,” Bey said.

That shift is difficult because many plants have decades of established behaviors. Ford described the challenge of moving the organization away from reactive maintenance. “We've been a reactive company for many years,” he said. “It ran like this for 50 years. Why are we going in and changing today?” The workers you want to change also need to understand why they need to change. Workers need to understand what failure is, Bey added, and leadership needs to standardize that process.

In some cases, like FedEx, organizations might need to redefine what good maintenance looks like. Bey explained that many companies have historically viewed failure too narrowly. “Failure is when it stops running,” he said. Yes, that’s true, but failures can be detected before it’s catastrophic. Waiting until equipment stops running means the organization has already lost the opportunity to prevent the failure. Creating reliability culture requires changing those definitions of success and failure.

Leaders create the conditions for reliability—or undermine them

Culture does not start or thrive at the technician level. Leadership decisions about priorities and accountability hold up reliability cultures. Hileman of Amazon described how reliability programs can fail when leaders do not create that alignment. “You have to all pull in the same direction. You have to have the same vision. You have to have the accountability,” he said.

Otherwise, maintenance, operations, and leadership teams can be working toward conflicting goals. Maintenance may want time for predictive routes and inspections, while operations is focused on keeping production moving. Then, reliability becomes something people support in theory but abandon under pressure.

Hileman emphasized that accountability must exist throughout the organization, starting with leadership and running throughout. “Everybody, no matter what position you hold, plays a very critical role from the bottom to the top, the top to the bottom,” he said.

Brian Heinsius, senior reliability manager at Eco Material Technologies, made a similar point when discussing maintenance leadership. The company mines fly ash, a waste product from power plants and reprocesses it to sell to the cement industry to replace a certain percentage of Portland cement for ready-mix concrete. “You cannot sit. Our sites are way too small for a maintenance manager to sit behind these desks,” he said. Reliability leaders must be visible, engaged and connected to what is happening on the floor. “If you're not hands-on, you're behind,” he added.

Whether this discussion centered on Amazon’s global operations or a much smaller maintenance organization, their maintenance leaders argued that reliability culture rises and falls with leadership expectations.

Workforce shortages make reliability culture more important

The labor shortage has increased the pressure on organizations to build systems that are resilient despite turnover. Heinsius described this staffing challenge that many industrial organizations face. “We lose people to the data centers, and we lose people to every other place because they can go make more money, not have to work as hard, and they get to be clean,” he added. 

For smaller maintenance teams, losing experienced technicians is the quickest way to significant knowledge gaps. “Our sites are very small,” he said. “We have six, eight maintenance technicians per site. That's it. I don't have planning capacity at the sites. I don't have a reliability engineer at the sites,” Heinsius said. That makes standardization and knowledge transfer vital.

Bey described the challenge organizations face when expertise is concentrated in a few individuals, and newer workers rely on experienced coworkers to set standards. “It fell on one or two individuals,” he said. “Now it's subjective. It's based on what their experiences are, not what data is telling them.” A strong reliability culture reduces dependence on individual knowledge by creating repeatable standard processes, which creates consistent decision-making.

Ford explained how turnover forces organizations to design programs that can withstand workforce changes. “If a technician leaves today, how can another technician take over this role?” he asked. That question has become important as manufacturers compete for skilled workers across industries.

Reliability teams must market their success

Even when reliability programs deliver results, organizations often fail to communicate those wins. I was surprised by how much time the speakers spent discussing communication and how to make reliability visible to the rest of the organization.

In a reactive culture, maintenance is often recognized and praised for restoring production after failures—not preventing those failures from happening. The firefighter mentality, where the maintenance heroes save the day, is a mindset that really negates the value of reliability. Instead, at Michelin, it celebrates the saves. Reliability spokespeople in every shop present to other departments about big saves. 

“Now you finally have maintenance getting a pat on the back for preventing machines from breaking in the first place,” Holt said. Michelan offers free lunch and company swag to encourage attendance.

Holding that reactive to proactive cultural shift requires reliability teams to communicate their impact. Energy savings, avoided downtime, improved asset health, and prevented failures all help demonstrate the business value of maintenance. Reliability improvements that remain invisible rarely receive continued support.

The future of reliability depends on culture

Across industries, organizations have access to more reliability technology than ever before. Sensors are cheaper. Analytics are more powerful. Artificial intelligence can identify patterns humans may miss. But technology will only accelerate the systems that organizations already have. As Hileman explained, AI is not a “magic bullet.”

The companies that gain the greatest maintenance advantage with advanced technology will be the ones that build the strongest reliability habits—where leaders reinforce expectations and technicians trust the process. Then, preventive work becomes part of everyday operations.

Predictive maintenance technologies will continue to amaze us, but only the organizations disciplined enough to act on the information those tools provide can do amazing things with it.