Manufacturing industry Industrial work: These 6 trends will shape 2025

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Augmentir

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What will work in the process and manufacturing industry look like in the future? And what does this mean for the people working there? A number of recent studies provide insights into this. The software manufacturer Augmentir has derived 6 trends for 2025 from these studies, supported by its own project experience.

Digitization, the shortage of skilled workers, and increasing competitive pressure are forcing companies to rethink their strategies. These developments pose significant challenges for production managers and digitalization managers. At the same time, they also present promising opportunities. From AI-supported training directly at the workplace to autonomous maintenance – the following trends are emerging for work in production and maintenance:

Training moves to the workplace

Two out of three companies aim to achieve one primary goal with their training strategy: maintaining their competitiveness. However, more than 50 percent also consider meeting legal standards and employee retention to be important, according to the TÜV Training Study 2024. More than half of the organizations surveyed (56 percent) prefer a combination of in-person and online training.

One might want to add "yet." The strong international competition forces companies to deploy workers in the high-wage country of Germany as productively as possible. This is where connected worker platforms come into play: they provide personalized instructions that guide and train staff directly at the workplace. The content for this on-the-job training is sourced, among other things, from manuals, standard operating procedures (SOPs), or existing training material.

Digital assistants rise to advisors

The rapid response to inquiries is also playing an increasingly important role. Already, 35 percent of companies are using chatbots for this purpose. Two years ago, it was only 25 percent. This is reported in a Bitkom study from September 2024. In manufacturing, the possibilities for using these dialog tools will significantly expand, with experts expecting a much closer integration of humans and machines. Intelligent, AI-based assistants will then not only provide support with questions but also proactively highlight optimization potentials and give action recommendations. The first co-pilots of this kind, specifically for industrial workers, are already in use in connected worker solutions.

Knowledge management becomes collaborative

Many managers are concerned with how they can optimally support their workforce during an internal or external position change. A study by the University of Bamberg (Germany) from the summer of 2024 reveals that less than 30 percent of respondents received a structured knowledge transfer, and in 82 percent of cases, the briefing occurred without digital assistance. However, the future lies in establishing a systematic and collaborative knowledge management system – and this future has already begun. AI-supported tools make it possible to automatically capture experiential knowledge from daily activities and collaboration with colleagues and make it accessible to others. Additionally, the latest generation collaboration tools "know" the context of the current task and, if necessary, bring AI assistants into team discussions as collaboration partners. "This creates a task-specific and continuously expanding knowledge database, allowing newcomers to be comprehensively and systematically oriented," says Carsten Hunfeld, Director EMEA of the software manufacturer Augmentir.

Paperless SOPs become mainstream

The digitalization efforts in the industry are making great progress. 88 percent of respondents give a positive assessment of their initiatives so far. These initiatives accelerate processes and workflows (53 percent), save costs through more efficient tools (48 percent), and increase productivity (46 percent). Paperless work is also becoming more common in production. "Most companies start by digitalizing SOPs," says Hunfeld. Since this often involves thousands, those responsible face a massive task, where AI assistants prove helpful in two ways. Firstly, they digitalize existing SOPs, images, or documents in no time. Secondly, they automatically convert them into interactive work instructions, troubleshooting guides, and training tutorials.

Autonomous maintenance succeeds in small steps

Maintenance also benefits from this digitalization. This is necessary because two out of three companies admit they experience at least one unplanned production downtime per month. For those affected, this results in costs of 147,000 euros per hour (approx. 158.985 USD), according to the "Value of Reliability" study by ABB. To increase the availability of their equipment, more and more companies are handing over ongoing inspection and maintenance tasks to their own machine operators. After all, they are intimately familiar with "their" equipment. To avoid overwhelming them with autonomous maintenance initially, it's advisable to guide and practice the work steps using digital checklists. This way, the additional competency in maintenance can be gradually built up.

AI aligns safety and health protection with people

A Canadian study from 2023 shows that every dollar manufacturers invest in occupational safety achieves an ROI of 1.24 dollars. Remarkably, this value increase does not result solely from the reduction of work absences. The participating companies see the positive effects on corporate image and employee retention as equally important as the financial benefits. At the same time, experts warn that measures to prevent accidents and health hazards on the job often do not achieve their full potential if they are applied indiscriminately. Dr. Martin Schütte, Scientific Director of the "Work and Health" department of the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, put it succinctly in an article from July 2024: "Measures targeting the individual, such as qualification or further training, are often the prerequisite for employees to meet job requirements at all and to perform the task with the required quality." In short: personalized training is the best occupational safety – and AI will facilitate this in the future. Based on skill management, it is able to identify individual needs and deliver appropriate instructions via app to each individual.

Conclusion

The six trends presented clearly show that the industrial work of the future will be more precisely tailored to the individual with the help of AI. This digital transformation offers manufacturing companies enormous opportunities to strengthen their workforce and improve processes. This, in turn, promotes competitiveness. Companies that recognize and implement these developments early on will therefore gain decisive advantages.