IndustryWeek

Manufacturers have historically been able to delay adopting new technologies without major consequences. That window is closing. As agentic AI moves into real production workflows, it is reshaping how companies execute, serve customers, and protect margins. Over the next 24 months, the ability to act, not analyze, will determine which manufacturers pull ahead and which fall behind.

Put benefits front and center. Strong benefits are key to a competitive EVP. In manufacturing, standout benefits include performance and attendance incentives (like bonuses, pay increases and PTO/flex time rewards), paid training and upskilling opportunities, predictable hours, generous paid time off and lucrative retirement plans. For example, HireClix worked with a major materials manufacturer struggling with low engagement in hard-to-fill roles.

Already registered? Click here to log in. Digital transformation on the shop floor doesn’t start with complex technology—it starts with making problems visible and giving teams the tools to act on them. Worthington Enterprises took this approach by moving away from manual whiteboards and disconnected tracking methods to a unified “Smart Factory” model.

The leaders of Slate Auto, the electric-vehicle startup backed by Jeff Bezos, have raised $650 million from a group of investors and say they’ll deliver their first vehicles late this year and begin taking pre-orders in a few weeks. Michigan-based Slate was incubated inside the Re:Build Manufacturing conglomerate and set out on its own in 2023.

Recent quarterly results from two notable wholesalers of industrial and construction supplies show that the manufacturing upswing, suggested by the early-2026 increase in closely watched indicators, looks to have legs. The area of concern, however, appears to be in costs and pricing, with war worries now joining the enduring effects of tariffs.

Walk into almost any operations meeting today and you’ll hear it: “We should use AI for this.” “Can we plug in an LLM?” “Let’s add a copilot.” In a recent internal meeting, one of our business partners—someone with deep technology and operations experience—paused and said: “This might be a stupid question… what is an LLM?” It stopped the room—not because it was a bad question, but because it was exactly the right one.

U.S. President Donald Trump warned Monday that any Iranian attack boats that approach the naval blockade he has ordered around the country's ports will be destroyed, despite international calls for a ceasefire to be respected and negotiations to resume.

It makes good sense for employees to feel invested in their workplaces—and understand how their day-to-day decisions about matters including scrap, downtime, quality and efficiency ultimately affect company health and profitability. So why isn’t business literacy practiced more extensively throughout manufacturing? Typically, employees are not taught how to read a profit and loss statement, or to understand how revenue becomes profit and how costs connect so directly to financial outcomes.

The uncertainty around the future of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership program overwhelmingly grabbed our IndustryWeek manufacturing community's attention in this issue of IW's Weekly Review. Still, other topics of interest include agentic AI, a potential chip shortage, respect for people and more. The Top 10 most consumed content over the past seven days are: Trump's New Budget Eliminates MEPs; Eight States Without Contracts: Latest claim from Trump: DEI has ruined the program.

In manufacturing, even a one-minute delay in remote access can compound into millions in lost production across sites. Yet many organizations still rely on fragmented tools, inconsistent workflows, and vendor access models that slow down routine maintenance and response. This whitepaper from Takepoint Research breaks down where operational friction actually shows up—from approval bottlenecks to inconsistent plant-level practices—and how it impacts uptime, vendor SLAs, and engineering efficiency.