Automating tasks is a tale as old as time. In manufacturing, robotic arms had their breakthrough in 1961, when a robot called Unimate was installed on a General Motors assembly line in New Jersey to handle die castings and welding.[1] Fast-forward to today and the capabilities of robotics seem even more dramatic. Humanoid robots are arriving and they are shockingly good at many things. One recently completed a half-marathon in a time that beat the human world record for the distance. So, will they soon also be able to replace all manufacturing work?

Most likely not. US manufacturing could need as many as 3.8 million workers by 2033 and roughly 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled if the skills and applicant gaps are not addressed, according to Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute. Sixty-five percent of manufacturers name attracting and retaining talent as their primary business challenge.[2] The federal push to reach 1 million registered apprentices points to the same conclusion: there is a real workforce gap that has to be filled.[3]

The Real Bottleneck is Maintenance and Training

In preparation for a panel I moderated on humanoid robotics in production at Automate 2026 in Chicago, I spoke with a range of manufacturers running US operations about what automation is actually doing to their workforce. For those who could not attend, the results presented at trade shows like Automate are sure to be impressive. But here is the risk I see. While there is real innovation happening, the driver of productivity growth for the near term does not lie in automation. It lies in training and upskilling and it will become an even bigger bottleneck for manufacturers across the automotive and machine-building industries.

I am confident that more and more tasks will be taken over by cobots, wheeled platforms and AI-assisted systems of all kinds and will reduce the need for lower-skilled operators. In an ideal scenario, those productivity gains translate into more revenue, more contracts, and ultimately into manufacturers expanding their operations. But then the biggest headache becomes finding the right talent to manage these machines. The hardest role to fill is the person who keeps an automated line running and improves it.

When Automation Changes the Business Model

This can even change a company's entire business model. I spoke with a company in Georgia that builds and installs fulfillment centers for some of the largest retail and e-commerce corporations in the US. Those corporations could not run the highly sophisticated systems themselves. To keep its customers satisfied, the builder would send its own staff to teach the customer how to run the systems. But those operators were not trained in how to pass on their knowledge, and the hoped-for transfer never happened. The customer was dissatisfied, while recognizing that the problem lay within its own walls, since the builder had never promised to run the machines for them.
The CEO of the selling company saw an opportunity in that gap. The result was a model of leasing the company's own service mechanics to clients to run the operations. It was a win-win. The customers no longer had to manage the machines and could increase their productivity, while the builder opened an entirely new line of business. That company is now hiring 300 more service technicians this year alone and is growing its revenue dramatically.

Rethinking How We Train

So, if robots cannot take over all the work in the near future, but instead shift it toward more complex tasks, what is the missing link? The answer is training. Companies need to invest heavily in their workforce, and it will take more than putting people in a conference room. Management has to be involved in creating the right training content and even more important, in developing a methodology that produces a short ramp-up time and avoids turnover and scrap during onboarding. Too few companies have specific KPIs in place to measure whether their training actually works.

A harder question is who should do the training. Being good at an operation does not mean being good at explaining it to someone else. Resources on the floor are often limited, but the common mistake I see across many companies is defaulting to the most senior person on the shop floor as the trainer. Sometimes that works well but it is more coincidence than planned knowledge management. Choosing the trainer matters as much as the material and the method. Trainers have to be motivated to train, not treat it as an added burden. Companies that treat preparing the right trainer as an investment tend to see strong returns. There is a reason this stays difficult. The person who can train others well is a harder role to fill than the person who can simply do the job. The fix is not complicated in principle, you need a deliberate process for attracting and keeping skilled workers, but it stands or falls on having trainers who can pass on knowledge quickly. The ability to transfer a skill is itself a distinct, trainable and undervalued capability, not a personality trait you hope your senior operator happens to have.

The Future of High-Mix Production

Training staff is becoming the most important task a manufacturer faces. That is especially true as the generational shift continues: young people have to be drawn to manufacturing through different incentives and motivations than 30 years ago. And that points to a larger truth. Your industry was different in many ways three decades ago, and I would argue it will look very different again in the next ten years, which should be seen as an opportunity. Growing segments such as semiconductors, battery manufacturing, medical device and pharmaceutical production and aerospace all appear to run on highly automated lines. What gets overlooked is that quality control, compliance, and process monitoring remain hard to automate. And for the many smaller manufacturers working in high-mix, low-volume custom and contract production, automation simply will not scale enough anytime soon. Those tasks may be automated one day. But a wait-and-hope approach means missing out on business in the meantime, which is exactly why now is the time to invest in your training programs. The robots aren't ready yet. Your workforce problem is here today.

Lukas Zitz is the Deputy Austrian Trade Commissioner in New York, the official trade promotion agency of the Republic of Austria in the United States. With extensive experience bridging international trade, industrial automation, and economic development, he regularly advises advanced manufacturing and technology companies on market expansion and transatlantic strategy. Most recently, he led a delegation of Austrian tech companies to the Automate trade show in Chicago to explore the integration of humanoid robotics in manufacturing.