Q&A: Why Manufacturers Need A Robotics Strategy Before Investing In Automation
Intel's recent Robotics Readiness Gap survey found that 70% of manufacturing leaders expect to manage a robot fleet within five years, yet only 4 in 10 have a formal strategy in place. Meanwhile, the global cloud robotics for manufacturing market is projected to reach $58.54 billion by 2035, according to DataM Intelligence. That is a lot of capital chasing automation with no operational backbone to capture the return.
Eric Thorsen, Senior Director of Industry Solutions for Industrial Manufacturing at Infor (formerly Google, NVIDIA, SAP), recently joined Automation World’s editors to talk about why robotic investment without a modern ERP foundation risks wasted spend, and what manufacturers need now to convert automation dollars into measurable output.
Q: What is the Intel survey you cite?
A: Intel's Robotics Readiness Gap report puts a number on something I hear on almost every plant floor. 67% of leaders believe they'll be ready to manage a mixed human-robot workforce by 2030. Only 40% have a formal strategy in place today. Confidence is outpacing readiness.
Our own Enterprise AI Adoption Index found something sitting right underneath that gap. Over three in four manufacturers, 77.3%, told us their data is mature and well-governed enough to support reliable AI. That's a lot of confidence in the foundation. I'd want that confidence tested before I built a robotics strategy on top of it.
Q: Why is there a lack of formal robotics strategy? What challenges does that create for manufacturers, and how can they address them?
A: Most manufacturers are further along on the robot than they are on the plan for it. I've watched the same pattern with every wave of automation before this one. Without a strategy, you get three great pilots and no way to connect them. The fix isn't complicated. Know what you're solving for across the whole operation before the PO goes out. Usually what's missing underneath that plan is the data. You can't sequence a fleet on top of information nobody trusts.
Q: What kind of robotics strategies are we talking about?
A: I'd map it against four stages. Visibility into what's actually happening on the floor. Prediction of what's coming next. Prescription, where the system starts recommending a move. Autonomy, where it acts and a person manages by exception. Most companies want to skip straight to stage four. You can't get there without the first two, and almost nobody has real visibility yet because the data underneath isn't structured to support it. And once a robot is acting on its own, whether that's rerouting a pick path or triggering a downstream process, you need the same governance you'd put around an AI agent making a decision. Speed without oversight leads to exposure.
Q: How does an industrial enterprise ensure robotics/automation spend results in valuable outputs?
A: You measure against business outcomes from day one, not the robot's uptime. If you can't draw a straight line from the investment to a number the CFO cares about, you don't have a plan yet.
Q: What kind of outputs?
A: The outputs that matter connect to throughput, quality and labor resilience. Fewer defects. Steadier cycle times. The ability to keep a line running when people are hard to find. There's a fourth one I speak about often as well - Decision Velocity: how fast you recover from a disruption, finding an alternate supplier, rerouting production to another site, without losing weeks figuring out the move. Robotics that only perform under stable conditions aren't solving the problem manufacturers actually have.
Q: What does the near future look like for industrial robotics, and what's cause for optimism?
A: The technology just caught up to the argument I've been making. Robotics and AI are converging in a way that makes automation adaptable instead of rigid, and the fundamentals haven't changed. Work isn't disappearing. It's evolving. The companies building the strategy now are the ones setting the pace.
