Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
Five speakers from five firms stood up at the MTC on Tuesday. None of them had compared notes. All of them landed in the same place. The technology was never the hard part. The people, the data and the process were. If you run operations and you have a pilot that worked and never went anywhere, that is the sentence to take from the day, and the rest of this piece is what sits behind it.
We compered Digital Manufacturing 2Day 2026, the MTC’s annual conference on data, automation and AI in manufacturing. It ran in Coventry on 13 October, with QAD Redzone as headline sponsor. Compering a day like that is a privileged seat. You hear every speaker. You hold the panel. You spend the breaks with the people who paid to be there. What follows is what we heard, what it adds up to, and what we would do with it. It is written for the operations leader who could not be in the room, or who was and wants the day in one place.
About the event. Digital Manufacturing 2Day is the Manufacturing Technology Centre’s annual one-day conference for manufacturers on data, automation and AI, held at the MTC in Coventry. The 2026 edition ran a morning of keynotes, three afternoon breakout tracks and a closing panel, with Nick Leeder & Co as compere.
What the speakers said
Joe Darlington, Chief Innovation Solutions Officer at the MTC, opened on clock speed. Unprecedented acceleration, a geopolitical backdrop that is not going to settle, and a bigger opportunity to move than UK manufacturing has had, which makes moving a competitive necessity rather than a nice to have. His line that travelled furthest through the day: no single organisation has the answer. For an operations leader that is permission to stop waiting for the complete plan and start with partners.
Chris Dungey, the UK Government’s AI Champion for Advanced Manufacturing and CTO of the HVM Catapult, gave the keynote and named the problem properly. Scan, pilot, scale. Begin with one operational challenge, not a technology. He then gave the best list we have heard of why pilots do not scale: integration, business case, readiness, and trust and validation. Not one of those four is a technology problem. He was equally clear on why manufacturing is different. Quality, uptime, safety and compliance are not optional. So the bar for trusting an AI system is higher on a shop floor than anywhere else it is being sold. And he put the worker at the heart of it, which turned out to be the theme of the day.
Davinder Lotay, Managing Director of Altimex, told the SME story, and for most of the room it was the most useful twenty minutes. He has put an ERP system into his own electronics business and lived with the consequences. Smaller does not mean simpler. Software is not digital transformation. The question is not how do we implement this, it is how should we operate. And the distinction he drew between “people knew” and “the system told us” is the one we would put on the wall. Altimex did not run a transformation team. Leadership owned it, staff were involved, the process was reviewed before the software touched it, adoption was phased, and the why of the change was explained before anyone was trained on the how.
Jonathon Hill, Virtual Manufacturing Global Capability Lead at Rolls-Royce, showed what simulation does at scale: design the process before anyone cuts metal, predict because variability is the norm, and keep the worker in the middle of the model even when the model is a whole factory. The challenge list he put up (cost, skills, customer demand, productivity, technology adoption, climate, energy, regulation) is the same list the SME two rows back has. The budgets differ. The list does not.
Steve Cartwright, Chief Engineer in the MTC’s Digital Engineering Group, pulled the afternoon together with thirty-seven years of automotive launches behind him. Data everywhere, little insight. Connect, optimise, scale securely. Build the data foundation first. And the sentence that was the whole day in four words: change management equals adoption. The workforce, he said, is the most valuable asset, and the question is whether people are willing to embrace the change.
In between, the afternoon ran three breakout tracks: connectivity and infrastructure with Ericsson and Dell, an optimise track with QAD Redzone, TXM Lean, McCormick and BAE Systems, and a scale-securely track with Made Smarter and Epicor. Delegates built their own afternoon and used the exhibition between rounds. Some of the best conversations of the day happened over coffee, which is true of most good events and worth planning for. The day closed with a panel: Clare Reynolds of Active Hands, John Parsonage of QAD Redzone, Jonathon Hill, Nandini Chakravorti of the MTC and Dami Awosanmi of AWS. It ran on questions from the floor rather than ours, which is how we like a panel to work.
What it adds up to
Put those five together and three things stand out.
People and change are the work, not the budget line after the software. Every speaker got there from a different place. The government’s AI champion. An SME owner. A Rolls-Royce simulation lead. An automotive launch engineer. When that many people who do not share a slide deck agree, it is not a trend. It is the finding.
Pilot purgatory has not moved, and it is not a technology problem. The World Economic Forum coined the phrase in 2019, for firms that had implemented advanced manufacturing technology “without realizing appealing returns on investment or measurable improvements in operational key performance indicators”, and put more than 70 per cent of the manufacturing ecosystem in that bracket [1]. Six years on, Rockwell’s survey of 1,560 manufacturing leaders found 56 per cent piloting smart manufacturing, 20 per cent using it at scale, and 95 per cent invested or planning to invest in AI [2]. Chris’s four reasons for pilots stalling are all decisions a leadership team can take before the pilot starts. That is why the number has not shifted. Nobody takes them.
AI needs data, and data needs a why. Steve’s “data everywhere, little insight” is the state of most plants we walk. The why comes from the people who run the line, which is where Altimex started and where most programmes start last.
What we would do with it
We spent the day writing a question on a pad and never got it answered: is any of this new? By lunchtime the answer was no. The second half of the question, how we actually change, got silence, on stage and in the room. So here is our view. It is practice experience rather than a survey finding, and it is three moves, not a programme. Each one can start this month with the people and the numbers a site already has.
Start where the room already agrees. Pick the one line number the site argues about in the morning meeting, agree how it is counted before the pilot starts, and let the people on that line report it. If Chris’s four questions (integration, business case, readiness, trust) cannot be answered on day one, do not start.
Write the behaviour, not the deployment. Davinder’s test is the useful one: will people know, or will the system tell them? Name the role that does something different on an ordinary shift and what they stop doing to make room. That is the leading indicator. Sensors connected and dashboards built prove the thing exists, not that it is used.
Ask for help earlier than feels comfortable. Joe said no single organisation has the answer at half past nine. By four o’clock it was the only thing everyone agreed on. The MTC, Made Smarter, the Catapults, the exhibitors, the person at the next table: the scarce resource on Tuesday was not technology or money, it was the willingness to say we do not know yet.
The question nobody answered
Tuesday proved the diagnosis is shared. The technology is not the hard part. The pilot that worked is still sitting there. The people on the line decide whether it scales. What no speaker, panellist or delegate had was a new answer to how a leadership team changes its own behaviour. That is the gap we would fill before buying anything else.
We take the measurement half of that question further in a piece for MX.0 Media later this month: Related: https://mx0media.com/themes/ . And on 3 November Nick hosts Beyond the Pilot, a free LinkedIn Live with Kevin Clark of Siemens and Jeff Winter of Belden, MX.0 UK’s chair: Related: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7514273852521115648/. The MTC’s next dates in our diary are The Quorum Principle Live in December and the National Manufacturing Summit 2027 in March; if you were not in the room this time, those are the ones to book.
What to do with this in the next month
Six moves an operations leader can make in the month after Digital Manufacturing 2Day, using the people and numbers the site already has.
- Pick the stalled pilot
Choose the one live pilot that has not moved to a second line, shift or site, and write down the number it was approved to move. If nobody can state it, that is the first finding.
- Find the line’s own number
Ask the shift leader which number the line already argues about in the morning meeting, and put it next to the approved number. Expect them to differ.
- Run Chris Dungey’s four questions
Run Chris Dungey’s four questions against the pilot before any further spend: integration, business case, readiness, trust and validation.
- Name the behaviour
Name one role that will do something different on an ordinary shift, and one task they will stop doing to make room.
- Agree the counting rule
Agree the counting rule for the line number and put it on the shift handover board, as a site rule for now.
- Book one outside conversation
Book a conversation with one outside organisation this month. Nobody in the room on Tuesday had the whole answer, and neither do you.
Frequently asked questions
Digital Manufacturing 2Day is the Manufacturing Technology Centre’s annual one-day conference on data, automation and AI in manufacturing, held at the MTC in Coventry. The 2026 edition ran on 13 October with QAD Redzone as headline sponsor and Nick Leeder & Co as compere.
Five speakers from five organisations independently concluded that technology is not the hard part of digital adoption. People, data and process are, and the worker has to be at the heart of any programme that is meant to scale.
Pilot purgatory is the state where a digital or advanced manufacturing pilot is live but has produced no measurable return or KPI improvement, so it never earns the decision to scale. The World Economic Forum coined the term in 2019.
Pick the one line number the site already reports, agree how it is counted, name the role whose behaviour has to change, test the pilot against integration, business case, readiness and trust, and ask for outside help earlier than feels comfortable.
Sources
- World Economic Forum, Global Lighthouse Network: Insights from the Forefront of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, December 2019.
- Rockwell Automation, State of Smart Manufacturing Report, 10th annual edition, 2025.
Speaker statements are reported from Nick Leeder’s compere notes taken on the day and attributed to the speaker, not to a published source.
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