AI and automation's adoption gap: what manufacturers must act on now

Eighty percent of U.S. manufacturing facilities operate with zero automation today. That figure, attributed to Intrinsic Chief Technology Officer Brian Gerkey and reported by Manufacturing Dive, lands with particular force at a moment when AI and robotics investment dominates industry headlines. The gap between what executives say they believe and what is actually deployed on factory floors is, by any measure, enormous.

The disconnect is not about awareness. Deloitte's 2025 Smart Manufacturing and Operations Survey found that 92% of manufacturers believe smart manufacturing will be the primary driver of competitiveness over the next three years, according to Manufacturing Dive. Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, told the same outlet that interest is uniformly high. Execution is where things break down.

Labor pressure is raising the operational stakes

The urgency behind closing that gap is intensifying because the workforce math keeps worsening. Honeywell CEO Vimal Kapur told CNBC in June that customers across hospitals, airports, data centers, semiconductor facilities, and LNG plants are struggling to find qualified operators and technicians. Aging populations and slowing workforce growth mean the shortfall compounds over time.

Kapur framed the response not as headcount replacement but as a redefinition of what automation is for. Customers, he told CNBC, are treating AI-enabled systems as revenue-generation tools rather than pure cost-reduction plays. That is a meaningful shift for any operations or procurement leader still building internal proposals around cost-out arguments: the framing itself may be slowing approval velocity.

Honeywell completed the spinoff of its aerospace division on June 29, leaving behind a focused automation business spanning sensors, controls, and software. Kapur told CNBC that the company's competitive position rests on the domain expertise and operational data already flowing through its installed base, which AI can now convert into optimization decisions that previously required direct human judgment.

New tools are expanding the entry points

Part of what has kept adoption low is that automation investments historically required substantial infrastructure commitment upfront. A cluster of product announcements in late June is beginning to change that calculus at the device and software layer.

ABB introduced its Ability Field Information Manager 3.5 platform, a vendor-neutral system designed to automate bulk firmware updates and manage mixed fleets of field devices across multiple manufacturers, according to Automation International. For operations teams running heterogeneous environments, a neutral management layer directly addresses one of the persistent friction points around automation: the cost and complexity of governing legacy equipment alongside newer systems.

On the sensing side, Sonair announced what Automation International describes as the world's first safety-certified 3D ultrasonic sensor. The ADAR One has achieved SIL2 and PL d ratings and meets the requirements of the European Machine Directive for detecting humans and objects in proximity. That certification matters operationally: SIL2 and PL d compliance is the required bar for deploying sensors near human workers in regulated environments, and until now, 3D ultrasonic technology had not cleared it.

Contrinex is expanding in the same space, adding miniaturized smart measurement sensors and 3D vision systems aimed at real-time monitoring applications, per Automation International. Compact form factors open automation options in environments where space constraints previously ruled out sensor deployment entirely.

The platform layer is consolidating

Below the device level, the control software tier is evolving as well. Congatec and CODESYS announced a partnership combining congatec's hypervisor technology with CODESYS control software to create virtualized real-time control platforms for mixed-critical industrial workloads, as reported by Automation International. Virtualizing real-time control functions on shared hardware is a notable architectural shift for facilities trying to consolidate OT infrastructure without sacrificing determinism.

Watlow, separately, introduced an edge process management platform targeting regulated thermal manufacturing environments. The system addresses the challenge of maintaining precise process data and secure digital records across temperature-driven operations, according to Automation International. Regulatory compliance documentation has been a persistent manual burden in pharmaceutical, food, and specialty chemical manufacturing, and edge platforms that automate record integrity are directly addressing that operational cost center.

What this means for your team

• Revisit your automation business case framing: Honeywell's Kapur is telling CNBC the strongest argument is revenue generation, not cost reduction. If your internal proposals are still primarily cost-out narratives, that framing may be limiting approval velocity.
• Evaluate vendor-neutral device management before your next field device refresh: ABB's FIM 3.5 targets the multi-vendor fleet problem directly. Operations teams managing mixed-manufacturer environments should pressure-test whether a neutral management layer reduces integration costs before committing to proprietary upgrade paths.
• Check safety certifications on any 3D sensing shortlist: Sonair's SIL2 and PL d clearance for the ADAR One is a first in 3D ultrasonic. If you are deploying collaborative or autonomous systems near workers in regulated settings, confirm your sensing stack meets applicable functional safety standards, not just performance specs.
• Assess virtualized control readiness: The congatec-CODESYS partnership points toward consolidating OT compute through hypervisors. Facilities planning infrastructure refreshes in the next 12-18 months should evaluate whether real-time virtualization fits their mixed-criticality workloads before locking in dedicated hardware architectures.