What will it take to prepare people for a manufacturing workplace increasingly shaped by AI?
This question is becoming central to manufacturing strategy. In a recent conversation with Carolyn Lee, President of the Manufacturing Institute, we approached it from different vantage points.
The Manufacturing Institute, based in Washington, DC, focuses on building and strengthening the manufacturing workforce. At NTT DATA, we work with manufacturers as they modernize operations and bring AI into everyday work. We reached the same conclusion: The future of manufacturing depends on advancing and transforming people, processes and technology together.
The workforce is part of the core
Manufacturing has always depended on people. The operators who run production lines, the technicians who maintain equipment and the teams who solve problems every day remain central to how factories perform.
That makes workforce readiness one of the first priorities as you embed AI more deeply into daily workflows and decision-making. You need people to adapt by adopting the technology and understanding how to interact with it effectively. More importantly, they need to know when human judgment must take precedence.
According to the Everest Group report Future of Work 2030: A Playbook for Workforce Transformation, sponsored in part by NTT DATA, 82% of manufacturers expect to reskill more than 30% of their workforce by 2030, and 70% expect AI copilots to become a core part of daily work. These figures point to changes both in technology adoption and in how manufacturing work itself will be performed.
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AI changes the work before it changes the job
Public discussions about AI often begin with concerns about job losses, but Carolyn offered a different perspective. Manufacturing has been at the center of every industrial revolution, and each changed the nature of work. AI will do the same. A maintenance technician who previously relied on experience, reviewing logs or searching manuals to diagnose a problem may now use an AI assistant to narrow the possibilities more rapidly. Doing so requires both technical expertise and the ability to frame the right questions, assess the response and know when human judgment should prevail.
We’re already seeing this in practice. We worked with a leading automotive organization where, over the years, key maintenance knowledge had ended up in places ranging from knowledge bases to logs and videos — and, quite often, the experience of individual workers. We partnered with our client to develop an AI capability that made all that information available in a brief conversation, helping the organization reduce downtime from five or six hours on average to about 20 minutes.
While AI gave employees faster access to the knowledge they needed when working under pressure, they also had to learn how to engage with the system, ask better questions and assess its answers. The technology created a new capability requirement even as it improved the work.
AI, people and workforce transformation
The Everest Group report found that “43% of enterprises identify low employee adoption or change resistance as a primary challenge in scaling workplace transformation.” That’s a clear signal that workforce preparation must be built into an AI strategy from the start.
Manufacturers need to begin with a clear business problem, business ownership and leaders who can explain why the change matters. Your workforce will need ongoing AI and data literacy that can’t be developed through a single training event. Your organization also needs strong governance that preserves human accountability for safety, ethics, security and decisions, especially where context and judgment are concerned.
This is what it means to modernize the core from a workforce perspective: creating an operating environment where AI and people reinforce each other, enabling employees to work more confidently, responsibly and productively.
Learning must be continuous and connected to work
Preparing today’s workforce is only part of the challenge. Manufacturing also needs to prepare the next generation of employees by equipping students with the technical and problem-solving skills they’ll need before they step onto a factory floor. As AI continues to change manufacturing in so many ways, education and industry will need to work more closely together than ever.
That’s one reason I have such respect for the Manufacturing Institute’s FAME program. Its earn-and-learn model combines classroom instruction with hands-on experience in real manufacturing environments. Students get to work with employers and mentors while developing technical skills and professional behaviors such as communication, teamwork, problem-solving and continuous improvement.
Those skills become even more valuable in an AI-enabled workplace. No single training program can prepare a worker for every tool or use case that will emerge. What it can do is develop people who know how to learn continuously, adapt to new technologies and apply them thoughtfully in real-world situations.
FAME now has 45 chapters in 17 US states and serves about 1,500 students. Growth is key here because manufacturing requires more than a one-time infusion of talent. It needs repeatable models that connect education to real work and help people become productive sooner.
ALSO READ: From manufacturing to retail, physical AI makes modernization real
WHAT TO DO NEXT
Watch the video series by NTT DATA and the Manufacturing Institute for insights into preparing the manufacturing workforce by developing new skills and managing change to attract the next generation of talent.