Trump wants to bring US manufacturing jobs back. Robot companies see an opportunity

Miami Herald

16-05-2025

DETROIT - President Donald Trump wants to see a resurgence of manufacturing jobs in the United States with his tariff policies, but many of these factory roles of the future will ultimately be filled by robots.
That's why attendees of this week's massive Automate conference in downtown Detroit - North America's largest robotics and automation gathering - see opportunity in Trump's reshoring push, which comes just as factory automation technology rapidly improves with artificial intelligence.
They are quick to point out that the country is already dealing with a shortage of about 450,000 manufacturing workers, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A study last year from Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute said that number could surge to 1.9 million by 2033.
"I see us in an acceleration period right now, and I think you can sense that here at the show in terms of the crowds and the type of people that are here," Mike Cicco, CEO of FANUC America, a large robotics firm headquartered in Rochester Hills, said on a Tuesday panel alongside several industry leaders.
Automakers and suppliers are a big focus of the automation industry. About half of North American robot sales go into car manufacturing, and many robot companies have a home base in Metro Detroit.
But several executives said their current sales growth is fueled by other sectors. Across two massive Huntington Place show floors packed with more than 800 vendors, companies showed off robot and automation products catered to streamlining restaurant kitchens, stacking boxes at distribution centers, performing surgery at hospitals, and sanding wood for construction projects.
"You can't think of an industry right now that's not automating," said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Ann Arbor-based Association for Advancing Automation, which hosts the conference. He said Automate has rapidly grown in recent years with registrations for 2025 topping 40,000 people. The event will shift to Chicago next year and Las Vegas in 2027.
North American robot sales slipped in 2023 and 2024 after surging during the pandemic as companies responded to supply chain and labor shortage issues. In the first quarter of 2025, sales were flat compared with a year earlier, with companies buying 9,064 units worth more than $580 million - an average of about $64,000 each - the association said this week. Automakers were a key growth sector in the quarter, snapping up 3,668 robots worth $263 million.
But Burnstein said another run of investment is ahead as labor issues persist, as robots get cheaper, and as companies try to keep pace with rivals in China, where factories are automating faster than anywhere else.
In auto manufacturing, steps along the process like painting and body production already are highly automated. Now executives say they are pushing into more complex areas traditionally reliant on humans, including general assembly.
Paul Stephens, global strategy manager at Ford Motor Co., said the carmaker wants to automate more of its manufacturing processes as the costs of robots and accompanying technology start to come down. Ford also is pushing its smaller suppliers to do the same in a bid to increase the quality of their parts. He said during a panel discussion that U.S. manufacturing is on the cusp of an "automation revolution."
Several companies pitched artificial intelligence tools as a way to spot quality issues with parts or vehicles - a task traditionally done with human eyes. Rajesh Iyengar, CEO of Lincode Labs Inc., said in an interview that a primary reason customers are turning to his AI-powered visual inspection tool is that they are struggling to fill their quality inspection roles, or retain those employees for more than two or three months. About 70% of the company's customers are in automotive.
"There's a lot of interest and a lot of movers in this space," Iyengar said, especially amid the current push to relocate car factories to the United States.
Also driving more automation in manufacturing is the rise of the collaborative robot, or cobot. These smaller-scale robots can be adapted to many types of jobs and have safety features allowing them to be installed alongside human workers. Cobots could be found in nearly every corner of the Automate conference floor, and are in contrast to larger industrial robots that move faster, handle beefy tasks like moving sheet metal, and are often fenced off from workers for safety reasons.
Travis Langford, automotive industry sales manager for cobot maker Universal Robots, said the company's offerings serve as a sweet spot between a human worker and a full industrial robot. They can more easily be retrofitted into factory layouts without costly redesigns and equipment overhauls. He said the company's robots are used for tasks ranging from picking parts out of a bin, to glazing car windows, or dispensing glue.
In more than 15 years, the Danish company with a North American headquarters in Novi has sold more than 100,000 of these smaller-scale robots. Langford said he sees a surge in sales around the corner as large global manufacturers start to catch on: "We haven't really hit the mass-adoption yet."
Brian Breuhan, senior manufacturing engineer with General Motors Co., said during a presentation that cobots could be used more along auto assembly lines, helping workers carry out tasks. He and others also mentioned humanoid robots as gaining early traction in some car factories; there was at least one humanoid robot giving high-fives to attendees on the Automate show floor.
In Breuhan's presentation - which explained how to develop the "factory of the future" - he acknowledged there would be fear and resistance among workers. But he said those concerns could be minimized through clear communication from leadership of the automation plan and by offering retraining programs, where workers might be shifted to new tasks in the plant if their current jobs were phased out - like servicing the robots themselves.
"Reutilize those people doing something fun, or that's useful, problem-solving or whatever it might be, to try and calm that fear," Breuhan said.
Cicco, the FANUC leader, said in an interview he hears a few reasons why potential customers want to automate, like a desire to increase quality, or up their production rate. But the most common response is: "I can't find people, or I've had to shut down my factory because of absenteeism, and things like that," the executive said.
Yet FANUC and the larger robotics industry is dealing with its own staffing challenges, Cicco said, which can't be solved with more automation. He said his company is tackling the problem by funding robotics training down to the high school level and putting several thousand robots out into schools to facilitate teaching.
"We need to bring more people into the workplace that know how to program robots, and maintenance robots, and fix robots, and install robots," Cicco said.
That recruiting effort becomes especially critical if demand for robotics accelerates as Cicco expects - including as the Trump administration uses tariffs to try to force more manufacturers to relocate domestically.
"Long term, there's a huge benefit," the CEO said. "I think we do need to make more things in America, and I do see that as a benefit to us long-term in the (robotics) industry."
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