With daily advances in technology, many employees wonder about the safety of their jobs in rapidly changing industries. Here is an update with predictions about employment in U.S. manufacturing.
Jobs in U.S. Manufacturing
The U.S. manufacturing sector is projected to lose the most jobs (-736,400) of any sector during the next decade. Although this rate of loss is notably less than in the preceding period (2006 to 2016), factors affecting future projections are expected to be more heavily influenced by automation-enabling technologies. The popular misconception is that these automation-enabling technologies (e.g., robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence [AI]) will yield an overall net decrease in employment rather than a re-appropriation of roles and responsibilities.
However, a B2B technology survey of 455 U.S.-based companies across nine vertical markets announced ABI Research, a market-foresight advisory firm providing strategic guidance on the most compelling transformative technologies, found that 67% of manufacturing respondents did not have IoT solutions in operation. Of those, 74% were either investigating, assessing or planning to deploy such solutions in the next 12 months. Survey results show that while a lot of the activity in non-connectivity categories are relatively simplistic deployments, industrial IoT (IIoT) applications share a common propensity for automation enablement: 35% of respondents in manufacturing are assessing AI, and 47% have either deployed or plan to deploy robotics solutions in the next 12 months.
Examples of Technology Improving Efficiency
Amazon’s use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in Prime fulfillment centers is a great example. Contrary to the popular belief that the use of robotics would eat jobs, there are instances where net-new hires increased as result of overall efficiency improvements in e-commerce throughput.
There are countless examples of this kind of technology-driven industry turnover in practice.
Walmart, the world’s largest nongovernmental employer, is using robots from Bossa Nova Robotics to scan shelves for out-of-stock items, check prices, and identify missing labels for a near-real-time view of which areas of the store need most attention. Here, shelf-scanning technology are used in combination with robots to help associates with repeatable, predictable, and manual tasks so they can focus on better serving the customer. Lowe’s has a similar implementation with Fellow Robots but for greeting and leading customers to the desired product; and Volvo Trucks is working with Uber Freight to eliminate inefficiencies in downstream logistics (due to wait time and/or the mix of short-haul versus long-haul trips) by coordinating load pickups and drop-offs with local truckers, changing the nature of not only trucking but also intermodal logistics.
ABI Research Findings
These findings are from ABI Research‘s Smart Workforces: Transformative Technologies for New Employment Paradigms report. This report is part of the company’s Smart Manufacturing research service, which includes research, data and Executive Foresights.